Class _i ; 

Copyiigkll . 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Fifth Horseman 



AND OTHER SERMONS 



By 

ROBERT HUGH MORRIS 

Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, 
H add on field, N. J. 
Author of "Sleeping Through the Sermon" 



FOREWORD BY 

EDGAR P. HILL, D.D. 

Secretary General Board of Education, Presbyterian 
Church, U. S. A., and formerly Professor of 
Homiletics, McCormick Seminary, Chicago. 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1922, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 

FEB 19 ^3 

' Cl A6SS353 



To my Friends and Parishioners in 
the Churches which I have had the 
Privilege of Serving; whose Loyalty 
and Encouragement have been an in- 
creasing Wonder and Delight to me, 
these Sermons are Dedicated. 



Foreword 



HOW different the sermons of today 
from the formal religious discourses 
of a century ago ! Then there was the 
prolix prelude, the clearly defined divisions and 
subdivisions, the exordium with its expected 
and impartial appeal to saints and to sinners. 
It is not so today. Something must be doing 
from the moment the text is announced. The 
modern preacher " must leap like a man from a 
moving train and touch the ground on the dead 
run. He must instantly throw a challenge to 
man's brain." Probably the difference can be 
expressed by saying that then the preacher " de- 
livered a discourse," whereas now he " gives a 
message.' 9 Dr. Burton in his Yale lectures in- 
dicated the change that was taking place when 
he said, " If I had been more interested in men 
and less interested in subjects my preaching 
would have been more vital than it has been." 
Has the pulpit been strengthened or weakened 
by this new style of preaching? Can a speaker 
make a deeper and more permanent impression 
by discarding the ordered arrangement of his 

5 



6 



FOREWORD 



points and depending on the more or less spon- 
taneous expression of his ideas ? 

An able and sympathetic critic of the pulpit 
insists that one of the outstanding weaknesses 
of the preaching of today is an inability to 
organize materials. Probably no preacher of 
the last generation did more to bring the formal 
religious discourse in disrepute than Phillips 
Brooks. Yet this prince of preachers did not 
hesitate to appreciate the virtues of the old pul- 
pit method. His testimony is most suggestive : 
" The statement of the subject, the division 
into heads, the recapitulation at the end, all the 
scaffolding and anatomy of the sermon is out 
of favor, and there are many good jests about 
it. I can only say that I have come to fear it 
less and less. The escape from it must be not 
negative but positive. The true way to get rid 
of the boniness of a sermon is not by getting 
rid of the skeleton but clothing it with flesh." 
The preachers of today will do- well to heed this 
caution. 

The sermons of Dr. Morris in this volume 
are good examples of modern preaching at its 
best. Everyone of them has its skeleton erect 
and properly balanced, but they are well cov- 
ered with flesh. The material is abundant and 
collected from many sources. The interpreta- 



FOREWORD 



7 



tions of the texts are deft, and the applications 
impressive. These sermons admirably illus- 
trate the wise counsel of the godly Tholuck 
who said that a sermon ought to have the earth 
for its mother and heaven for its father. They 
are Christian messages that fully meet the re- 
quirements of the late Principal Forsythe, who 
declared that he cannot conceive a Christianity 
to hold the future without words like grace, sin, 
judgment, repentance, incarnation, atonement, 
redemption, sacrifice, faith, eternal life. The 
ideas connoted by such great words as these are 
found on every page, from cover to cover, set 
forth with winsome clearness and fidelity. 

EDGAR P. HILL. 

New York, N. Y. 



Contents 

I. The Fifth Horseman . .11 
Revelation xix.ll 

II. My Garden and the Spices 

Thereof 24 

Song of Solomon iv.16 

III. Not Dreamt oe in Our Phil- 

osophy 35 

I Corinthians ii.9, 10 

IV. How to Raise the Dead . . 48 

II Kings iv.34 

V. The Cure eor the Troubled 

Heart 64 

John xiv.l 

VI. The Hills oe Help . . .75 
Psalm cxxi.l 

VII. The Gospel Message in a World 

oe Spiritual Dry Bones . . 87 
Ezekiel xxxvii.4 

VIII. The Great De-socializing Dis- 
ease 99 

II Chronicles xxvi.21 



10 CONTENTS 

IX. Feasting and Praying on 

Mount Carmen . . .115 
I Kings xviii.42 

X. The Cost of Calf- Worship . 126 
Exodus xxxii.l, 3, 4 

XI. That He May Run That Read- 

ETh It . . . . 138 

John xix.20 

XII Reaching Rome . . . .149 
Acts xxviii.14 



I 



THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 

"And I sazv heaven opened, and behold a white 
horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful 
and True; and in righteousness he doth judge and 
make war," — Revelation xix.ii. 

THE portentous figures of The Four 
Horsemen have ridden themselves into 
the imaginations of men since the day- 
John sent forth his great book of the Revela- 
tion. Painters, ancient and modern, have at- 
tempted to portray these meaningful and 
ominous riders of the paths of doom. Seizing 
upon them as they were charging unchecked 
over mankind and devastating all the earth, 
Blasco Ibanez compelled them to point a moral 
and adorn his tale of love and hate, of life and 
death. Dazed with the actual horrors of world 
war, men shuddered even more violently when, 
under the spell of Ibanez's imagination, they 
saw and felt these grim and ghastly monsters 
thundering along their destroying way. 

It is somewhat surprising that, in a popular 
way at least, so little has been said of another 
Horseman pictured by that same John whose 

11 



12 THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 



graphic pen limned the Fearful Four. Yet this 
Fifth Horseman is described at greater length 
than the others and John's prophecy shows 
him triumphing over all preceding conquerors. 

He is called 66 Faithful and True." He, too, 
" doth judge and make war," but it is " in 
righteousness." His eyes flame with victorious 
and purifying fire. His brow is decked with 
many crowns. Armies follow him. We seem 
to see unnumbered battalions all clothed in 
clean, fine, white linen, and all mounted upon 
white horses. 

Prophecy rises to exalted strains of poetry 
in which this mightiest captain of the white 
company is described as unsheathing a sword 
from his lips and with it smiting rebellious 
nations. We see him as he breaketh the sword, 
cutteth the spear in sunder, and burnetii the 
chariots of earth's proud warriors in the fire. 
There is a terrible majesty and glory in the 
apostle's marshaled words, which themselves 
sound the thunders of charging, victorious 
hosts : " He treadeth the wine press of the 
fierceness and wrath of Almighty God." (xix. 
15) The culminating indication of his ma- 
jesty and glory is that on him is written the 
name : " King of Kings and Lord of Lords." 

The triumphing glory and power of this true 



THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 13 



world-conqueror is made more concrete and 
vivid when he is contrasted with those grisly 
Four Horsemen of whom we read in the sixth 
chapter of the Apocalypse. Let us stand aside 
for a few moments while these riders dash by 
in their might and glory, and let us follow them 
as, for a time, they triumph. Let us then ob- 
serve how this other Rider, with his white 
legions, destroys them one by one. 

1. " Behold, a white horse: and he that sat 
on him had a bow ; and a crown was given unto 
him : and he went forth conquering and to con- 
quer." (vi.2) While no one individual can be 
said to embody this horseman, it is interesting 
to note how many conquerors like Caesar, 
Ghengis Khan, and Napoleon, have affected 
white steeds. 

Some have thought this first horseman to be 
the symbol of earthly victory and glory. Others 
have seen in him the embodiment of godless 
but none the less glorious civilization such as 
that of Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Still others 
have thought of this rider as picturing the out- 
ward beauty and glory and conquering power 
of the Roman Catholic Church. 

Because this rider is mounted upon a white 
horse, just as is the true Captain General of 
men's souls mounted upon a white horse; be- 



14 THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 



cause unto him is given a bow and a crown; 
because like the greater Counterpart who is to 
overwhelm him, he is crowned as a conqueror. 
Let us summarize his significance by saying 
that this is a figure for anti-Christ. This is 
true whether anti-Christ were, is, or is to be 
incarnated in one single individual, or whether 
anti-Christ is but the spirit which usurps the 
prerogatives of Christ in his sway over the 
imagination, the affections, the achievements, — 
in a word, over the lives and destinies of men. 

Perhaps we may make clear our point of 
view if we suggest that this first horseman, 
this anti-Christ, is indeed a figure for godless 
civilization. Those mighty empires which 
sprang up, flowered, bore evil fruit, rotted, and 
were broken off without hope of recovery — ■ 
what were they, what are they, other than that 
very spirit of anti-Christ ? 

Probably we have no such thing as Christian 
civilization. At least, it is startling to note how 
practically every school of thought agrees with 
the assertion that we have no such thing as a 
Christian America or a Christian Great Britain. 
The religious scoffer says that it is not Chris- 
tian and he laughs at the idea that it ever can 
be made Christian. The conservative Christian 
individual bemoans the fact that we are not 



THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 15 



" Christian America/' The progressive, not to 
say radical, elements of the Christian Church 
agree on this one thing at least, that conditions 
morally and spiritually are far from ideal. One 
group of us is hopeless over the conditions, and 
sadly but with emphasis asserts that we shall 
never be Christian until Christ arrives in per- 
son to destroy all wickedness and drive out all 
evil men. Another group says that we shall 
never be Christian until men have become so 
saturated with the spirit of Christ and the 
ideals of Christ that they themselves will 
cleanse and purify and thus redeem the world. 
Whatever point of view we may have and how- 
ever we may differ in our interpretation of how 
He is to come, we, with all Christians of every 
land and every name, agree on this: that no 
civilization in which Christ and His divine 
principles are not followed, can stand the test 
of time. In the figure of the Apocalypse, 
the glory, the beauty, the gorgeous apparel, the 
glittering crown, the gleaming white horse, the 
conqueror's bow, and all that is suggested and 
shadowed-forth by this first horseman, must 
be and will be destroyed forever by the great, 
true Conqueror who alone has the right to sit 
upon the white horse of purity and lead the 
white company to eternal victory. 



16 THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 



2. " And there went out another horse, that 
was red : and power was given to him that sat 
thereon to take peace from the earth, and that 
they should kill one another: and there was 
given unto him a great sword." (vi.4) The 
instrument of warfare in the hand of this sec- 
ond rider is one which brings him into personal 
collision with his enemy. Men may sit upon 
thrones of glory and, in an impersonal way, 
make war. This is pictured for us by the bow 
held by the rider of the white horse. He may 
maintain position and power, so long as he 
does maintain it at all, without any personal 
animosity, without any actual bitterness and 
hatred. But men who strike each other with 
the sword are in no calm mood. They are in a 
frenzy of speed and of hate. The one who 
strikes first is the one who conquers. The one 
who does not strike is the one who dies. This 
is the philosophy of war! The late German 
Empire was not the only nation which, acting 
upon this perfectly logical principle, made war 
and met its doom. 

It seems impossible for great nations to 
catch a glimpse of the divine philosophy of 
Christ who proclaimed that they that take the 
sword shall perish with the sword. Well 
named is this second horseman. The word 



THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 17 



Saint John used to describe him was the word 
" pyrrhos." The ancient Roman world which 
surrounded Saint John was a world which had 
been taught to feel terror at the very name of 
Pyrrhus, a great general of many centuries 
before. His name, itself signifying fire, had 
become a figure, a faded metaphor, for that 
which glowed with the colours of blood and 
fire. 

Let no man deceive himself. War rides over 
the earth on just such a steed; fire and sword 
eternally accompany him. War seems to have 
taken its toll, from the earliest record to this 
present moment. Not only the " thousand 
wars of old " which Tennyson so beautifully 
describes as being rung out by the Christmas 
bells which ring Christ in, but also these mod- 
ern wars, so terrible in their size, monstrosity, 
and destructiveness that they more than equal 
the thousand wars of old; — all these are but 
outward forms and expressions of that which 
is here figured by this rider upon the horse of 
fire and blood. My friend, let us not deceive 
ourselves. We may fancy that wars will cease 
through the progress of civilization; we may 
dream that men, in sheer fright of the awful 
consequence of war, will desist from making 
war. Mr. Will Irwin's book, "The Next 



18 THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 



War," pictures for us what we may expect 
when the world breaks loose in the mad frenzy 
of war again. It is well that such books should 
be written and widely read. Sermons should 
be preached, not only from the pulpit, but from 
the lips of every peace-loving and God-fearing 
man and woman, denouncing the spirit of war. 
But again let me say that we need not hood- 
wink ourselves and fatuously believe that this 
awful scourge of mankind will leave of its own 
accord. Certainly he will not be driven away 
by a godless, Christless civilization, by the 
spirit of anti-Christ. 

The destruction of this baleful and sinister 
rider will never come to pass until he is driven 
away forever by the Fifth Horseman and his 
strong cohorts. Let us not misunderstand one 
another here either. Christ alone can save the 
world from future wars, whether we think of 
Him as returning in a visible, tangible, and 
personal way, or whether we think of Him as 
coming only in the hearts and lives of men. It 
is not a theological doctrine upon which we are 
intent, but the point we emphasize is that if 
there be no Christ in the affairs of men, war 
shall succeed war ; fiery rider shall be followed 
by riders more fiery still, until world-wide 
destruction settles down over men like night 



THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 19 



and the thunders of bellowing cannon sound 
" taps " over the grave of civilization. 

Is the picture too gloomy? Not one of those 
soldiers who suffered in the trenches of Bel- 
gium and France, not one of those seamen on 
the decks of vessels which sailed dangerous, 
mine-strewn, submarine-infested seas, will say 
that the picture is overdrawn. 

3. " And I beheld and lo a black horse : and 
he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his 
hand." (vi.5) As the red horse was a "pyrr- 
hos," so this horse is a " melas," a melancholy 
figure; not the glowing, rich color of fire, but 
the dark, sad pall of unrelieved suffering; the 
flat, stale, and commonplace color of dull, dun 
days and agonizing, starless nights. 

The word for which " black " is the transla- 
tion is " melas," which everyone will recognize 
as being a part of such words as " melancholy." 
This is famine. A decade ago it would have 
seemed impossible to believe that within ten 
years as many millions of our fellow-beings 
would perish from hunger and exposure, as had 
been killed with the instruments of war in the 
preceding five hundred years. Yet startling as 
such a statement is, a writer in one of our 
magazines of high repute recently gave as his 
computation that since July, 1914, the number 



20 THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 



of men, women and children who have died of 
hunger was equal to the number that had been 
killed in war in the half millennium preceding 
that date. And the end is not yet. 

I fancy I hear someone say, " Surely no 
Fifth Horseman is necessary in order to drive 
famine from the earth." We have said a few 
moments ago that in a strict sense neither 
America nor Great Britain can be called Chris- 
tian countries ; but let it be noted that these two 
peoples which are most nearly Christian, which 
approximately obey the laws of Christ, are the 
peoples and the only peoples amongst whom 
famine is unknown. It is only by the spirit of 
Him who multiplied the loaves and fishes that 
the hungering multitude might not go unfed,— 
it is only where His spirit rules that there is 
abundance and to spare. 

The Psalmist cries, that God openeth His 
hand and all His creatures are fed. In perhaps 
a different sense from that which the Psalmist 
intended, let me paraphrase this by saying that 
" He openeth His hand, Jesus Christ, and 
through Him all who believe on Him are fed." 
I am quite well aware that many of the wick- 
edest of earth are also the wealthiest ; and that 
monsters who should be condemned to starva- 
tion, sit themselves down to wasteful banquets 



THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 21 



every day. But the exception does not disprove 
the rule. It was the Psalmist also who long 
ago saw this and cried, " I have been young, 
and now am old ; yet have I not seen the right- 
eous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." 

4. " And I looked and behold a pale horse : 
and his name that sat on him was Death, and 
Hell followed with him." (vi.8) The fourth 
rider is mounted upon the most lugubrious 
steed of them all. The " lean, abhorred mon- 
ster 99 that bestrides the pale horse is Death. 
The horse is described as " pale/' but the word 
means livid-green, cadaverous, the colour of a 
corpse many days dead. The imagination 
shrinks in horror from the contemplation of 
this grisly rider and his death-coloured beast. 
One need not enlarge upon the progress or the 
power, upon the swiftness or the certainty, with 
which Death overwhelms everything before 
him. More merciless than an angry tiger, more 
blighting than untimely frosts, more resistless 
than ocean tides, snatching as his victim the 
speechless babe and the gray-haired man, the 
fool and the philosopher, who shall stand before 
him and to say to him, " Thus far shall thou 
come, and no further 99 ? 

Yet he too is doomed. " The last enemy to 
be destroyed is Death." There are those who 



22 THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 



know nothing of the story of One who tri- 
umphed over death and the grave, and there 
are those also, who, though they know the 
story, refuse to believe it. But let me remind 
you today, that there is not even a promise of a 
triumph over this terrible rider, save as it is 
made in the person and teachings of Christ. 
We are not unmindful of the shadowy intima- 
tions of immortality which the ancients had, — 
their " pale realms of shade," their " lands of 
the dead " ; nor do we forget the Nirvana of 
Buddha or the Paradise of Mahommet. Still 
we assert that the only serious claim of One 
who hath abolished death and brought life and 
immortality to light through the Gospel, is the 
claim of Christ and His apostles. 

The Four Horsemen still ride, apparently un- 
checked in their course of destruction. But 
yonder at the head of His White Company, this 
Fifth Horseman awaits God's eternal zero 
hour. 

Do we believe in Him, do we accept Him as 
the one hope of mankind for the destruction of 
these other merciless riders? Do we realize 
that all these things have their origin, as well 
as their counterpart, in the individual human 
heart and that when we open the gates of the 
soul so that the Fifth Horseman may ride in, 



THE FIFTH HORSEMAN 23 



in conquering power, our little individual anti- 
Christ, our self, our pride of accomplishment, 
must go; that the enmity and bitterness of our 
hearts, whence come wars and fighting, will be 
driven out; that the famine of the soul sug- 
gested by our Saviour's words, " Man shall not 
live by bread alone but by every word that pro- 
ceedeth out of the mouth of God " — that this 
famine shall be broken; and that we who are 
dead in trespasses and sin shall find that death 
itself hears the voice of the Son of God, and 
that they who are in their spiritual graves come 
forth and live ? 

f~\ H, Christ, thou great Captain of the white 
hosts of God, thou who art the Con- 
queror and to conquer, thou who art King of 
Kings and Lord of Lords, drive out from these 
hearts of ours all haughtiness, pride, and self- 
elevation; conquer in these hearts of ours all 
hates, and wars, and give us peace and love; 
break unto us the bread of heaven that our 
souls may not starve; and give us that resur- 
rection from sin and death that will mean for 
us entrance into an inheritance, incorruptible 
and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. 
Amen ! 



II 



"MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES 
THEREOF " 



"Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; 
blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may 
flow out." — Song of Solomon iv.i6. 



MAN'S religion should show itself in 



the fruits of his life. Jesus stated this 



fact in an axiomatic manner, " By their 
fruits ye shall know them." 

If my beloved is to come into his garden, — 
if Christ is in my heart,— my beloved should 
eat his pleasant fruits. 

The garden of the soul may be likened to the 
gardens which men plant and from which they 
expect to gather flowers and fruit. No garden 
will yield its best bloom and fruitage if it is un- 
cared for. Wild things, nauseous weeds, loath- 
some insects, a thousand and one enemies, seen 
and unseen, seem to conspire against the plant- 
ings of man's hand. Every amateur gardener, 
even on the smallest scale, can testify that ma- 
lignant forces seem to have determined that he 
shall not reap the results of his labours. He 
is in a position, even after one brief sum- 




24 



M MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES " 25 



mer's efforts in the garden, to appreciate the 
feeling of a certain husbandman who sowed 
good seed but whose servants came soon to 
report that tares had sprung up among the 
wheat. He can feel for that husbandman when 
in bitterness of spirit he says, " An enemy hath 
done this." 

It is not otherwise in the garden of the soul. 
Forces seen and unseen sow tares amongst the 
good seeds. Thorns and thistles seem to spring 
spontaneously from, the earth. All the fa- 
voured soul-plants are in danger of being de- 
voured, starved, choked by enemies. 

We might follow in detail the analogy and 
show that the unseen spores of rot and micro- 
scopic disease germs work as much havoc, de- 
stroy as much fruit, blight and blast as much 
bloom, as the larger and more patent enemies, 
the aphides, the rose beetles, the caterpillar, the 
grub and cut-worm, rank grasses and usurping 
weeds. The garden of the soul must be care- 
fully watched. It is necessary, but not suf- 
ficient, that good seeds and healthy trees should 
be planted. There must be the sunshine and 
the rain, and also there must be this eternal 
vigilance against the destructive hordes, which 
like a biblical army of hungry locusts, seem 
waiting watchfully to pounce upon and destroy 



26 " MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES " 

the soul's tenderest, sweetest, and most delicate 
plants. 

Unremitting labour, and patience to a degree 
that will qualify us for membership in the ar- 
canum of patient sufferers like Job, are neces- 
sary if good things are to be grown,— if our 
beloved is to* come into his garden and eat the 
pleasant fruits thereof. 

The garden is ours, that we may dedicate it 
to our beloved. The garden is ours that we 
may plant and nurture and guard. The garden 
is ours that we may bestow upon it ceaseless 
toil, loving labours. We are not to forget, 
however, that there are forces and powers 
which are beyond our control, and that these 
are essential to true development, to full 
growth, to blossoming and fruit bearing. 
Among these powers and forces which lie be- 
yond our power to direct and control are the 
winds of heaven. 

That the winds play an important part has 
been known to- gardeners for many centuries. 
It has remained for modern times to discover 
some of the mystery, the eerie plant-magic, in 
which the winds are the wings of the fairies. 
Now, just some such apprehension of the part 
the North wind and the South wind must play, 
if his beloved is to eat the fruits of the garden, 



MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES " 27 



must have been in the mind of the inspired 
singer of this ancient poem. His invocation 
of the winds may or may not have been chosen 
with a thought of their antipodal origin and 
their opposite tendencies, but he could not have 
chosen a more correct statement, a more fitting 
figure. 

The winds which blow over the garden of 
the soul are many. They come from every 
point of the compass. They seem to spring up 
from beneath our feet. They swoop down on 
us from the hills. But of all these winds, from 
the gentlest zephyr to the most raking tornado, 
none can furnish a more fitting symbol of cer- 
tain experiences which help to mellow the soil 
and make fallow our garden plot than that of 
the North wind. 

The apostrophe to the unseen, but powerful 
forces of the air, is addressed first to the North 
wind. Every student of poetry in any lan- 
guage is interested in the words the poet uses. 
It will interest us to know that when this an- 
cient Hebrew poet called upon the North wind 
to blow over his garden, the word which he 
used is one which has in it the fierce, hungry 
roar of the North. For where he cries, 
" Awake, oh, north wind/' we may substitute 
the sounds of his Hebrew imperative and read 



28 " MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES " 



it, " A-o-o-r, O North wind." The word itself 
is a roar. He does not beseech the wind to 
soften itself ; he invites its coldest, sharpest, 
most stinging blasts. 

It is essential in the development of the best 
character, in the ripening of the best fruits of 
the soul, that there be that in our experience 
which corresponds to the stinging cold of the 
breath of the north. It is trite and common- 
place, but none the less true, that this is one of 
the explanations why those men and women, 
for conscience sake, came to New England 
shores in the early days of the seventeenth 
century. Not alone the inhospitable climate, 
the more inhospitable melancholy forests, and 
the still more inhospitable red men, who in- 
habited that forest,— not alone these things, in 
their nature partaking of the North wind's 
blasts; but also to these physical discomforts, 
hardships, and dangers, add the pangs of 
separation from friends and native land, and 
the vague fears and apprehensions of an un- 
known life with untried experiences before 
them, and you have in part the explanation 
of the development of that character which 
has become proverbial for the strength, for 
the ruggedness, for the honesty, for the thrift, 
for the devotion to duty which to this minute 



MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES M 29 



are characteristic of the descendants of the 
Pilgrims. 

Mr. Luther Burbank has experimented with 
apple trees, protecting all except one branch 
from the winds of winter, by covering with a 
tent and keeping the air inside at a temperature 
above freezing. The unprotected branch was 
bitten by the frosts, washed by the rains and 
snows, and wildly shaken by the snarling North 
wind. In the spring, all the coverings were re- 
moved and the tree allowed to bloom and bear 
fruit. The most abundant and beautiful 
blooms, the largest and most perfect apples for 
colour, shape, and soundness, were on that limb 
which was exposed. 

A rose grower told me a short time ago that 
some of his finest hybrid-teas were failures 
when shipped to Florida or Southern Cali- 
fornia, but that in a climate where the sting of 
genuine winter was felt, these delicate roses 
were the greatest success. It seems surprising 
to think that the land of roses itself is not ideal 
for full development of colour, form, and fra- 
grance of the hybrid-teas in the garden of the 
soul. Yet, who does not know from his own 
experience that much that is best and sweetest 
in his life has been in some part at least due to 
bitter experiences ? 



30 " MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES " 



I love to repeat the story they tell of Robert 
Louis Stevenson. Exiled from his native Scot- 
land to Samoa because of tubercular trouble, in 
his new home in the Pacific seas, " Louis the 
well beloved " suffered other ills. The story 
goes that at one time he was confined to his bed 
because of sciatica, and his room was darkened 
and his eyes bandaged because of an affection 
of the eye. His right hand was tied to his side, 
lest a sudden and unexpected movement should 
break loose the delicate and diseased cells of 
his right lung and cause a hemorrhage while in 
this condition. In this darkened room and 
propped in his bed, almost helpless, writing 
with his left hand, in great sprawling letters, 
on a child's slate, he produced that little volume 
which has gladdened the hearts of unnumbered 
children, " A Child's Garden of Verse." 

Rejoice, my friend, if the great and good 
gardener, the Lord of winds, has invoked the 
North to roar over your garden. 

The North wind plays its part and is indis- 
pensable in developing the finest, rarest, and 
most fragrant flowers of the soul. But the 
North wind must not blow always. The poet is 
very suggestive in his order in invoking the 
winds. The winter snows and frosts, its biting 
winds, prepare the way for the coming of 



MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES * 31 



Spring. But if there is to be any pulsation of 
life, any flowing and driving of the sap, any 
swelling of the buds, any unfurling of the 
green banners of the trees, any scented blos- 
soms, any heavy-fruited bowers, the South 
wind too must blow. 

" Which is the wind that brings the heat ? 
The South wind, Bessie, soft and low; 
And peaches will ripen for you to eat, 
When the South begins to blow." 

The God of things as they are, has beauti- 
fully blended for usefulness the contrasting and 
apparently hostile forces of nature. He has 
promised that " Seedtime and harvest, and cold 
and heat, and summer and winter, and day and 
night " shall join their contradictory efforts and 
work out His glory and man's well being. He 
sends no bitter experiences without some com- 
pensating cup of joy. " Weeping may endure 
for a night, but joy cometh with the morning. ,, 

Every Pastor knows with what happy aston- 
ishment he has observed the effect of the warm 
south wind of God's sweet love, in the frost- 
bitten lives of some of his parishioners. I have 
in mind now an elderly saint of God, an officer 
in the Church. Humanly speaking his life pre- 
sents a series of tragedies. In a happy and 



32 " MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES 



beautiful home, his devoted and brilliant chil- 
dren grew up. Just at the full glory of young 
womanhood, a daughter suddenly died. A few 
years later another, an unnameable sprrow 
came into his life. Still a few years later a 
second daughter, — gifted, charming, and be- 
loved by all who knew her, — was taken away. 
In recent months, the wife and companion of a 
long life time went " in a moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye." Bereft, the house of life 
beaten by storm after storm, out of the icy 
north of sorrow and death, I have been en- 
thrallingly surprised to hear his wonderful 
testimony of the South wind which God had 
sent into his life; for he said, " After all, the 
Lord has been very gracious and kind to me." 

Surely it is not merely some blind, imper- 
sonal law of averages; surely it is not alone 
some general principle of compensation ; surely 
it is the sweet breath of the South in the garden 
of the soul which enables true Christians to 
bear whatever is laid upon them. Our Heav- 
enly Father who is not only wiser but also ten- 
derer and kinder than we are, breathes over us 
with the airs of Eden, and under those genial 
zephyrs the garden bursts into bloom and is 
rich with fruits for our beloved. 

Because this is His way of dealing with us, 



" MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES M 33 

we may learn lessons to govern our actions and 
attitudes towards those whom God has placed 
in our charge and keeping. Thus the children 
in the home; the servants; the employees; the 
pupils in Sunday school or day school; these 
each and all require for their spiritual develop- 
ment the word of encouragement, the sympa- 
thetic understanding, the tender touch. If only 
such things are in their lives and experiences, if 
only the South wind doth blow, they will be at 
best hot-house plants unable to stand any of the 
rigours of the winters of life. But, on the 
other hand, if nothing but heavy tasks, severe 
requirements, harsh commands, stern repres- 
sions, and all other North-wind things of life 
are unrelieved by that which corresponds to 
the breath of the South, there can never be the 
greatest, fullest, most beautiful, most fragrant, 
most fruitful development. 

Climbing Mount Washington recently, I ob- 
served that just at the edge of the timber line, 
the stunted, gnarled shrubbery was so wind- 
swept and frost-bitten on the north side that 
there were no branches. A few stunted green 
arms stretched themselves appealingly to the 
south. Deep in the valley below and on the 
lower slopes of the hills, it was another story, 
for the North wind and the South wind had 



34 " MY GARDEN AND THE SPICES 



both contributed to the hardening, to the full 
development, to the symmetry and the glorious 
beauty of great umbrageous trees. North and 
South had blown about them. The noblest men 
and women too have known both. 

Should it not be a comfort to us, this knowl- 
edge that it is in mercy and love that God sends 
the North wind and the South? Instead of 
murmuring or fainting under this rod, shall we 
not cry with the ancient poet, " Awake, O 
North wind ; and come, thou South ; blow upon 
my garden, that the spices thereof may flow 
out"? 

Thou giver of every good and perfect 
V - ^ gift, Thou who didst not spare Thine 
only Son in the days of His flesh, Thou who 
hast in all generations permitted the north wind 
to blow on the gardens of the soul, and Thou 
who hast ever alternated these cold winds with 
the warm breath of Thy love, breathe upon us 
Thy spirit, giving to us the powers of endur- 
ance and causing our lives to be full of bloom 
and fruitage, so that " Our Beloved may come 
into His garden, and eat His pleasant fruits." 
Amen. 



Ill 



" NOT DREAMT OF IN OUR 
PHILOSOPHY " 

" But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, 
the things which God hath prepared for them that 
love him!' 

"But God hath revealed them unto us by his 
Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the 
deep things of God' 1 — I Corinthians 11.9, 10. 

THE apostle is writing to a highly cultured 
people. The ancient Greek saw very 
clearly, he heard most acutely, his think- 
ing was both profound and accurate. Even yet 
we delight in the beauty of form which he saw 
in his world and has handed down to us in his 
sculptured marbles. Even yet we are charmed by 
the cadences of his majestic poetry, sung to ears 
which in those far off days could hear and repeat 
sublimest music ; sung by a Homer, an iEschy- 
los, a Sappho. Even yet we stand in admiration 
and wonder before the profound and wide-reach- 
ing minds of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. 

The apostle, in writing to this people of 
taste, refinement, and thought, reminds them 
that there is a sphere of realities which is be- 

35 



36 " NOT DREAMT OF 



yond the ken of the natural man ; which his un- 
aided faculties are powerless to conceive, much 
less his senses to see or to* hear. 

Paul first approached the Corinthians with a 
simple gospel. He reminds them that it was not 
with eloquence and wisdom that: he had at first 
sought to win them. He had come predetermined 
not to know anything) save Jesus Christ and Him 
Crucified until the evangel had been proclaimed 
and men had turned unto the Saviour. But lest a 
people who were proverbial lovers of wisdom 
should feel that, after the first principles had 
been accepted and learned, there was nothing 
further for them in the message Paul had to* de- 
liver, the astute apostle claims that he has a 
higher wisdom to impart than any they have yet 
known. " Howbeit," he says, " we speak wisdom 
among them that are perfect." That is, to those 
who already have mastered their earlier lessons,, 
he has later and fuller and higher mysteries to 
reveal. Paul, like the wise modern preacher, 
must have recognized a two-fold claim upon him- 
self : as a preacher of the Word he must be an 
evangelist to those who are ignorant of Christ 
or have never yielded allegiance to Him, and he 
must also- carry the converts further along the 
sublime path of religious truth: in a word, 
" sinners must be converted and saints edified.' ' 



" NOT DREAMT OF " 37 



So that no one might confuse the body of his 
wisdom or doctrine with the wisdom of his 
Hellenic readers and hearers, Paul then hastens 
to add that his is not the wisdom of this world, 
nor of the princes of this world: his is the wis- 
dom of God: wisdom, older than their oldest 
books ; than their race itself ; yea, older than the 
world in which they live. 

The people of Athens, we read elsewhere, 
greatly loved to hear some new thing. The 
Corinthian Christians, who were probably not 
different in this respect from their Athenian 
brothers, are told they may hear a wisdom so new 
that none of their wisest men has even known it 
and so old that it had been ordained before the 
foundations of the world, — a wisdom that could 
never be acquired by the ordinary channels of 
knowledge. It could not enter the heart of man 
through seeing or hearing, nor could it be de- 
vised by the imaginings of the heart. 

This is another and highly vivid way of say- 
ing that the profound truths of our great faith, 
— the philosophy of our religion, if you please, 
— is something which must come as a revelation 
by the spirit of God in the spirit of man. For we 
have further record that " God hath revealed 
them unto usi by his Spirit : for the Spirit search- 
eth all things, yea, the deep things of God." And 



38 " NOT DREAMT OF " 



it is no less true for us than it was true for the 
Corinthian Christian of the first century, that 
we need more than unaided natural powers to 
perceive the meaning of life and to understand 
the dealings of our Father-God with us. 

The eloquent words of our text have often 
been used as if they referred to the glories of 
the blessed life which shall be hereafter. The 
glories of our Father's house, in which there 
are many mansions, are so unspeakably beauti- 
ful that the eye of man hath not seen anything 
like unto them ; and the heavenly harmonies so 
exquisite, so enthralling, that the ear hath never 
heard the like. All that blessed estate prepared 
for the sons of God is so glorious that our 
wildest imagination can not picture it. All 
this is absolutely true; but if the apostle had 
this in his mind at all, it was secondary in his 
thinking. He is speaking primarily, as the 
whole context shows, of the incarnation of 
Christ as the Lamb slain from the foundation 
of the world and yet as the Lord of Glory, 
whom wicked men slew. And the great " wis- 
dom " of his message is an explanation of the 
counsels of God, of His great love wherewith 
He loved us; of all the might and glory and 
beauty of the life which is hid with God in 
Christ. In a fuller sense Paul, like Milton on 



u NOT DREAMT OF " 39 



a later day, would " justify the ways of God to 
man." His quotation, taken freely from Isaiah, 
is true of the entire content and body of our 
sublime faith; for we do not see God with our 
physical eyes, — we do not hear His message 
with our physical ears, and we cannot grasp the 
meaning of spiritual things with our human in- 
tellects. In other words, spiritual things are spir- 
itually perceived. The natural man with his nat- 
ural channels does not receive spiritual things 
because they are in a different order, — just as a 
ship could not be driven over the seas by a poem 
describing a storm, or just as a tree could not 
pluck itself up by the roots and walk away. Such 
things do not happen because they cannot hap- 
pen. That, I take it, is the apostle's argument. 

What! The eye cannot see? Think, will 
you, of what the eye, unaided and alone, can 
and does see? Then recall Emerson's illumi- 
i nating suggestion as to what might happen if 
we went on opening one eye after another until 
we looked out upon our universe with an infi- 
nite number of eyes. But these two small orbs 
of ours look out upon a world of glorious 
beauty around us, — flowers, exquisite in form 
and colouring; green fields; glorious, umbrag- 
eous trees ; graceful valleys watered by shining 
streams ; sweetly curved hills ; ragged mountain 



40 " NOT DREAMT OF " 



pinnacles ; the azure sunlit ocean ; the delicately 
penciled clouds in the deep cerulean sky; and, 
poured round and over all, the golden sunlight ! 
What glories we see by day! And then, the 
velvet darkness of the night; the sleeping 
meadows; the dark, mysterious waters; the 
great, arching vault of heaven, scintillating 
with thousands of stars and perchance a fairy 
ship of a new moon riding down into the west ; 
the world-old sight which bent above our 
cradles and will canopy our graves ! What 
beauties we see at night! Then magnifying 
our power of vision more than a thousand- 
fold, we look through the microscope upon the 
fungi growing from a dead tree and see there 
fairy worlds, coral-coloured forests, gold and 
amber pavements, and the exquisite shape and 
delicate tint of that miniature cosmos. Or we 
turn our greatly magnified vision into the one 
hundredth part of a drop of water where again 
are revealed to us beautiful beings that have 
their habitat in this tiny ocean, and where little 
creatures move with a dignity that reminds us 
of Tennyson's stately ships which " sail on to 
their haven under the hill." Or we look into 
our giant telescopes and find that what had 
seemed to be a faint, white dust on the floor of 
heaven, is a thousand stars, each one a distant 



NOT DREAMT OF " 41 



sun, probably the center of systems of worlds 
and satellites far grander than our own solar 
system. Aye, me ! What marvels the eye hath 
seen ! Yet it is literally true that we have not 
seen with this eye spiritual things. The nat- 
ural eye beholdeth nature's glories as a polar 
seal, rising from his icy home, might look into 
the zenith and see a point of light : but, what 
to him would be the northern star, that star 
" that hath no fellow in all the firmament," that 
star by w r hich the hunter guides his feet in the 
trackless forests and the sailor steers his ship 
on the moving floods ? What spiritual vision 
we have of the majesty and beauty and glory 
of God behind His universe, and in it, and shin- 
ing through it, we may be sure are revelations 
of His spirit. It took a spiritually-minded 
psalmist to cry, " The heavens declare the glory 
of God and the firmament showeth his handi- 
work." The natural eye of man sees in Jesus 
only the son of Joseph and Mary : the spiritual 
eye sees a Saviour and Lord. God give to each 
of us spiritual vision, that upon Him we may 
look and live. 

It is astonishing how often in the Scriptures 
men are urged to hear. The refrain of the Old 
Testament books, " Hear, O Israel," has its 
echo and counterpart in the New Testament in 



42 " NOT DREAMT OF 99 



such phrases as, " He that hath ears to hear, 
let him hear/' We have been speaking of 
things which are revealed to the natural eye in 
order to emphasize the necessity of the spiritual 
eye. Likewise we can draw the contrast be- 
tween that which is audible to our physical ears 
and that which no device of man will ever 
gather from the outer air and register upon the 
tympanum of our ears. Wonderful, however, 
are the things which we do hear. Is it to be 
marvelled at that when the ancient Norseman 
heard the heavy rolling of thunder, he pictured 
mighty but invisible gods, hidden behind the 
black curtains of clouds, rumbling along in ce- 
lestial chariots, or hurling heavy hammers, or 
" drinking delight of battle " on the plains of 
heaven ? One can well lament the loss of won- 
der and awe that has accompanied the disillus- 
ionment which scientific knowledge has brought 
to us. But even yet perhaps, the very fewest 
of us are totally unmoved by the roar and crash 
of thunder, by the deep bass of the storm, by 
the liquid notes of waterfall or breakers or 
plashing rain; the voices of nature around us 
have awed, alarmed, fascinated, soothed, or in- 
spired us from time immemorial. Add to these 
the mellifluous notes of the birds, the ringing 
voices of children, the perfect pitch and sweet 



NOT DREAMT OF " 43 



tones of the singer, the eloquence of the orator, 
and you have some faint conception of the 
marvelous gamut of sound which finds its way 
through the small auricle of the ear to our 
brain. Just as there are rays of light deeper 
than red or higher than violet which our eyes 
do not register, so too there are sounds which 
do not reach us either because they are below 
the range of our hearing or because they are 
far above. 

We have devised instruments to increase the 
power of hearing and in these latter days we 
have gone beyond the magic pictured in the 
" Arabian Nights," and with radio apparatus 
we " listen in " on all the music and eloquence 
of men, on the call of the ship in distress at sea, 
on anything or everything which is flying 
hither and there as if upon the wings of the 
wind, but ten thousand times faster than wind 
ever moved. We reach out into the apparent 
silence of night and bring these sounds into our 
ears. Yet unspeakably marvellous as is the ear 
it is after all a physical organism, and it hears 
but physical sounds. Spiritual messages are 
sometimes couched in physical form, but the 
physical ear hears them not. It must be a spir- 
itually attuned ear to hear also the message in- 
tended for the soul. Of the thousands who 



44 u NOT DREAMT OF " 



heard Jesus speak in the days of His flesh, com- 
paratively a very small number heard Him with 
their souls. You, my friend, how is it with 
you? You hear the music of the choir, you 
hear the words of the sermon, you are pleased 
or displeased, or left cold and indifferent! Do 
you hear the spiritual message underneath? 
Are you trying with the physical organism to 
hear spiritual things ? The apostle says it can- 
not be done. The eye cannot see and the ear 
cannot hear, but God gives us spiritual ears and 
if we will but open them, we may hear what He 
has to say to us. 

Now, the things that have entered the mind 
of man, the things his heart has conceived, sur- 
pass what he can see and hear, what he has seen 
and heard. His castles in Spain, his fair vis- 
ions of ideal conditions, but bespeak the sub- 
lime fact that the mind of man can and does 
conceive marvelously. Those things which he 
has dreamed out and caused to be erected em- 
phasize the majesty of his mind. All the monu- 
ments of earth, the Pyramid and the Sphinx 
keeping tireless watch at the foot of the desert 
over the land of the Nile ; the Taj Mahal, ex- 
quisite in its finish as a polished pearl, memor- 
ializing a husband's love for his lost wife; the 
mighty shaft which pierces the blue, Southern 



" NOT DREAMT OF " 45 



sky in our nation's capital, fit symbol of the 
lofty and enduring but unadorned character of 
our great first President, — what are these but 
silent witnesses of the glorious things the mind 
can conceive? Have you walked under the 
high arches in the naves of the world's great 
cathedrals ? Have you not drunk the beauty of 
their priceless windows, and felt a satisfaction 
which nothing else can give while looking upon 
their flying butresses, their lofty pinnacles, 
their mighty towers? The mind of man con- 
ceived these cathedrals before they took con- 
crete form in stone. Think too of man's poetic 
creations, — an Iliad in which seas are crossed, 
cities are stormed, battles are fought on wind- 
swept plains, and mighty heroes live and love 
and suffer and die. Think of the imaginations 
of a Dante which were given permanent form 
in his great " Inferno " : the gloomy caverns of 
hell, the stormy blasts, the pitiless fires, the end- 
less tortures, may not appeal to our modern 
sense of the dealings of God with man in the 
hereafter, but they move us to admiration when 
we think of them as the conceptions of the 
human mind. So too with a " Paradise Lost," 
a " Lear," a " Hamlet," an " In Memoriam." 
When we have thought through these things 
and a thousand other things wherein the rich, 



46 " NOT DREAMT OF 



incalculable glories of man's inner life have 
expressed themselves outwardly, we come 
again to the expression of the apostle, " It 
hath not entered into the heart of man to 
conceive." 

It would be a great thing if men truly could 
believe and did believe this ; for, alas, too many 
men seem to think that " an honest God is the 
noblest work of man/' and that the riches of 
moral truth, the glories of divine revelation, 
the inspired utterances of prophet and apostle, 
— that these are but other forms of the imagi- 
nations of men. But it is not so, my friend. 
The heart of man might conceive a character 
like Ulysses, like ^Eneus, like Hamlet, but what 
mind would ever dream-out a Jesus of Naza- 
reth, springing out of a sordid and mercenary 
people to startle his own and every after age 
with moral and spiritual truth? I say to you, 
it is unthinkable. And if the character, the per- 
sonal traits and intellectual equipment of Jesus, 
transcend men's imaginative powers, how much 
more does this great work, His sacrificial life 
and death! 

If we today are depending upon our natural 
resources and powers, we are not appraising 
these spiritual messages correctly; and if we do 
not, with our enlightenment, our centuries of 



" NOT DREAMT OF " 47 



inherited interpretation, how can we think that 
a handful of ignorant and unimaginative men, 
fishermen and tax-gatherers, could have con- 
ceived such a character and given him to the 
world? It remains true, dear friends, that the 
eye cannot see, the ear cannot hear, and the 
heart cannot conceive the things which God 
from all eternity has had in store for us. These 
things have been shown to our spiritual eyes, if 
they see, and have been spoken in our spiritual 
ears, if they are open. God has moved upon 
our hearts to grasp something of the meaning 
of the fullness and glory of life as it was lived 
and taught by Jesus of Nazareth. May His 
spirit enable us today to hear a message from 
above, to see and accept the " Saviour which is 
Christ the Lord," and to feast spiritually upon 
the things which God hath prepared for them 
who love Him. 

T X T"E thank Thee, our eternal Father, for 
* » Thy gifts to us; for a world of beauty 
in colour and in form ; for a world of inspira- 
tion in music and voice; for rich intellectual 
and spiritual feasts. Give us, we pray Thee, 
the power to see, the power to hear, and the 
power to know Him " whom to know aright is 
life eternal." Amen. 



IV 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 

" And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put 
his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his 
eyes, and his hands upon his hands; and he 
stretched himself upon the child, and the flesh of the 
child waxed warm." — II Kings iv.34. 

SIR W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, the dis- 
tinguished editor of the British Weekly, 
relates certain events in the life of Mas- 
sillon, the great French preacher of the eight- 
eenth century. He had been appointed, in the 
earlier years of his ministry, to preach for the 
benefit of the young king, then nine years old. 
This was so successfully and so beautifully 
done that the next year Massillon was received 
into the Academy, and the Abbe Fleury pub- 
licly commended him, saying that like Elisha he 
had accommodated himself to the dimensions 
of the Shunammite's son. 

We unhesitatingly affirm that this power of 
accommodation, backed up by true faith, and 
used by the Spirit of God, is the secret of 
raising those who are dead in trespasses and 
sins, in indifference and coldness, to spiritual 
warmth and life. The parent in the home, the 

48 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



49 



teacher in the school, the Pastor in his Church, 
and the Church in the community, and even the 
statesman and executive in the nation, may find 
in this apparently naive action of the ancient 
prophet the profoundest suggestion and exam- 
ple for their dealing with their respective 
charges and constituencies. Children differ 
among themselves even in the same family. 
There are children who seem to have been bom 
spiritually in early infancy if not coincidentally 
with physical birth. Doctor Harper, my prede- 
cessor in the old North Broad Street Church, 
Philadelphia, used to say of his son-in-law, who 
was one of the saintliest of men, that he be- 
lieved " Harry " was " born regenerated." Ad- 
mitting that many children early begin to mani- 
fest spiritual traits and perceptions, we may on 
the whole assume that the normal child requires 
a spiritual resurrection, and some such process 
as this which Elisha used in raising the dead 
boy is recommended. In the home, in the Bible 
School, in the day school, wherever children are 
dealt with, it is essential that we accommodate 
ourselves to the dimensions of childhood, that 
we lay the warmth of our spiritual natures 
upon their spiritual beings, that we become the 
channels through which God shall breathe into 
them spiritual breath. 



50 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



In following this line of thought today, let 
us keep in mind primarily this relationship of 
the older generation to the younger. Because 
however, you, my hearers and friends, are 
placed in different positions of responsibility 
and because all of you collectively, represent 
the Church, we shall illustrate our general 
theme by reference to any one of the parallel 
themes which we have suggested. It may not 
be good homiletics for the preacher to jump 
from one theme to- another ; but at least a ser- 
mon so constructed has this advantage, that 
each hearer can take that phase of the subject 
which is most germane to his life-problems and 
keep that line of thought uppermost in his 
mind. In this sense w r e shall be having three or 
four sermons in one: the parent and teacher 
will be thinking of the child in the home or the 
school, the minister will be thinking of his con- 
gregation, the church will be thinking of its re- 
lationship to the community, the statesman will 
be thinking of his relationship to the people 
and problems of his nation. 

The wise prophet secluded himself with the 
object, the lifeless form, upon which he wished 
to bring influence and exert power. There 
were no distractions from the praise or the 
blame of the by-standers. Alone with God and 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



51 



the dead body of the child, he gives himself 
over wholly to his sublime undertaking. A 
large part of our failure in affecting the cold, 
lifeless spirits of the individuals and the com- 
munity upon whom and with whom we would 
exert wholesome and life-giving influences, is 
just here. We are divided in our concentration 
upon, not to say consecration to, our great task. 
An occasional word of reproof, rebuke, exhor- 
tation, entreaty, encouragement, praise — a brief 
blessing before the meal, a few pious platitudes 
with reference to religion and church duties, — 
is about all that many parents, even in church 
homes, find time to bestow upon their children. 
Patient and thorough instruction, line upon line 
and precept upon precept, here a little and there 
a little, shutting out the world and its voices of 
praise and blame — thus and only thus, can par- 
ents expect results in their efforts to raise chil- 
dren to spiritual life. Likewise a church di- 
vided in its devotion, trimming its sails to 
every popular wind, or church members who 
" Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks 
with every gale," how can such a church, such 
a people, impress, challenge, lead, — in a word, 
raise from spiritual death to spiritual life, — the 
individual, the community, the nation ? 
There is a fuller and further suggestion in 



52 HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



each point of contact established between the 
living body of Elisha and the dead body of the 
Shunammite's child. The prophet lay upon the 
child and put his warm lips upon the cold mouth 
of the child. This was a natural and necessary 
point of contact. He would expand the lungs, 
blowing his own breath into the respiratory 
organs of the child. He would imitate that 
divine example recorded in Genesis where it is 
said that God breathed into man the breath of 
life. This simple and natural effort is highly 
suggestive. It means that our children, our 
churches, our nation, must receive instruction. 
The power of good example has often been 
dwelt upon. It would be the heighth of folly 
to underrate the value of example. It is neces- 
sary, however, to emphasize the fact that a 
good example alone is insufficient. 

Some years ago at a Father-Son Banquet, a 
sixteen-year-old orator told his audience, half 
of whom were fathers, " Fathers, we boys do 
w T hat we see you do, not what you tell us to do." 
As one of the later speakers, I took occasion to 
say that in rearing my own children, I had 
found that it was essential to say what they 
should do as well as to do what I would have 
them do. I reminded them that the average boy 
under fourteen years of age would view with 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



53 



great complacency the process of seeing his 
father use soap and water on his hands and 
face three, four, half a dozen times a day, and 
would not be very likely to follow that example. 
That in the case of my own boys, at least, it had 
been necessary, literally hundreds of times, to 
say, " Son, you must wash your face and 
hands," 

We are too prone to- think that if we are 
truthful, our children will be truthful, whether 
or not we teach them the sin, shame, and danger 
of lying; that if we live lives of purity of 
thought and action, that no impure thought 
will ever overwhelm them; that if we love and 
serve the Lord, our children will naturally fol- 
low us into the church. Again let me say that 
in no sense do we underrate the high value, the 
essential necessity, of the good example ; but we 
do emphasize the fact that the precept must go 
with the example. We parents often neglect to 
give counsel to our children on the greatest and 
most imminent problems of life, physical and 
spiritual. 

Let us not forget either that our preceptorial 
utterances must be in the language which child- 
hood speaks. We must bring our message in a 
way that is at once clear and forceful, and at 
the same time perfectly understandable. 



54 HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



It has been a sin of the church, in dealing 
with its children of tender and also of mature 
years, from early days, that it has too often 
failed to recognize this fact. Jerome's " Vul- 
gate " was an effort to correct the tendency of 
the church to* deliver its message in a language 
which no one understood. In due course of 
time, the language of the " Vulgate " had been 
outgrown. Outworn forms of expression 
which meant something to* former generations 
but mean none to the present, block the way to 
the hearing of truths. 

I am persuaded that children resent " being 
talked-down to," and am likewise persuaded 
that a congregation is insulted, and rightly so, 
if they feel that the speaker or preacher thinks 
them incapable of understanding any message 
except one reeking with slang and vulgarity. 
At the same time, I am even more firmly con- 
vinced that we err in our efforts to instruct our 
children and our communities because as par- 
ents and as churches we insist on ancient shib- 
boleths, outworn phrases, dead language, and 
even dead dogmas. You may or may not ap- 
prove of Mr. William, A. Sunday ; his theology 
may seem to you crass, his methods crude, and 
his language, at times, exceedingly vulgar. 
You cannot but have noticed, however, that 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 55 



" Billy " reaches the crowd. Men know ex- 
actly what he is talking about; whereas, the 
church too often deals in subjects that are for- 
eign to the thought of the general community, 
and expresses itself in a kind of sacred but 
long since stereotyped form of speech which 
has lost all meaning to the average " man of 
the street." No preacher who has a message, 
and who speaks that message in the language 
of his day and generation need be without a 
sympathetic, understanding audience. No* par- 
ent or teacher whose words of wisdom are 
spoken in living, picturesque language, and 
based upon things already known in the experi- 
ence of children, need fear he is failing to in- 
spire them with his message. 

Much of the misunderstanding and conse- 
quent unhappiness and misfortune of mankind 
is due to difference in point of view. When we 
know life from our neighbor's angle of vision, 
it is a safe venture that we will in large meas- 
ure sympathize with our neighbor. If we place 
our eyes upon the eyes of our child, our com- 
munity, we see what they all see, in some meas- 
ure at least, as they see it; and so can better 
understand. This is just another way of say- 
ing what a distinguished Southern orator, 
Senator L. Q. C. Lamar, said to his own people 



56 HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



in reconstruction days : " My countrymen, let 
us know each other better and we shall love 
each other better/' Former President Wilson 
once told a small group of ministers a little 
story concerning Charles Lamb. Lamb, who 
stuttered, said to a friend, concerning a third 
person, " I ha-ha-hate that man." " Why," 
said his friend in astonishment, " I did not 
know you had ever met him, or knew him at 
all." " I do-do-don't," replied Lamb, " I ca- 
ca-can't ha-hate a man I know." And what 
constitutes knowing a man, if it is not seeing as 
he sees? I do not know the man who passes 
my door every day, but whose home life, whose 
business, whose pleasures, whose hopes and 
aims are totally hidden from me. Far better do 
I know a man whom I have not seen with my 
physical eyes but who has revealed himself to 
me in books, poems, sonatas. Thus we may, if 
we have read their writings or studied their 
music, say that we know Hugo, Longfellow, 
Beethoven, far more truly than we know many 
a person whom we pass on the streets daily. 

A little story is told involving Marie An- 
toinette, the ill-fated Queen of French Revo- 
lution days. A mob had stormed the palace in 
which the Queen and attendants were tempo- 
rarily dwelling. In the fore part of the mob as 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 57 



they rushed up the broad stairs and swept, like 
an angry tide in a narrow cove down a long 
hallway, was a young and beautiful but frantic 
and hate-filled woman. The surges of the mob 
caught up and drove with crushing force the 
frail body of this young creature against the 
doors of the very apartment in which the 
Queen sought sanctuary. By and by the doors 
were forced, and the poor, fainting girl fell un- 
conscious, almost lifeless, at the feet of soldiers, 
who dragged her into the room and fought 
back the remainder of the mob. After the 
angry insurgents had been driven out, the un- 
fortunate girl awakened from her unconscious 
condition to find herself being tenderly nursed 
by a delicate and beautiful woman. As full 
consciousness returned, she recognized her 
nurse as none other than Marie Antoinette. 
" Oh," she sobbed, " I didn't know the Queen 
was like this." And, my friends, we do not 
know what fair visions, what tender hopes, 
what high ideals, what true manliness, is in that 
noisy boy, that rough and tumble young bar- 
barian, whom we look upon as the pest and tor- 
ment of the class-room or the community, until 
we come eye to eye with him. The teacher who 
cannot or who* will not view the problems of 
her charges from the same angle of vision with 



58 HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



those charges, finds herself daily further and 
further away from any real influence she might 
hope to have. The parents who through ob- 
stinacy, selfishness, indifference, or absorption 
in other things, do not and will not make 
efforts to view child problems from the chil- 
dren's angle of vision, will find the home con- 
stantly stirred with discord and marred with 
misunderstandings. 

It is not otherwise when the Church would 
reach with its message, and mould and shape 
into something finer and nobler, the life of the 
community in which it is placed. That stern, 
severe, and repressive morality which is beyond 
all question correct in the abstract, but which is 
not understandable to the poor, broken, sinful 
humanity around it, would fail in its mission. 
Near the heart of one of our greatest cities is a 
beautiful churchly edifice which bears an hon- 
oured name. In a former generation, it was 
erected to house worshippers of the wealthy 
and cultured groups of the community. Under 
changing conditions, most of these have either 
died or moved to the suburbs. Outside the 
walls of this beautiful and costly edifice surge 
the great tides of a mighty city. The flotsam 
and jetsam are washed up even upon the stone 
steps of this temple of Christ. Yet on the Sab- 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 59 



bath day a bare handful of the remnants of a 
once large and highly cultured congregation 
find a place of worship. Why is this true? Is 
it not because the message, the thought life, the 
whole point of view of the Church is conceived, 
delivered, lived from a different angle of vision 
from that of the people around it? On the 
other hand, scores of churches in our great 
cities have readjusted their program, have got 
down, eye to eye, with their communities, have 
endeavoured to solve the problems of the people 
around them, and are, therefore, warming back 
into life many that were cold and dead. 

It is not enough that we should speak our 
message and view life's problems in a way that 
will be understandable and helpful to our 
charges. It requires also that there should be 
the touch of the hand, that there should be 
gentle and yet firm, leadership. " His hands 
upon his hands." 

We train the younger generation for ma- 
terial tasks by teaching them to use their hands. 
From the making of shoe pegs to the perfection 
of radio-phones; from the sweeping of floors, 
to the writing of sonatas and symphonies, the 
hand is used, — ever guided and directed, of 
course, by the brain. It is that marvelous in- 
strument, the human hand, which has piled the 



60 HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



pyramids, chiseled the columns of temples, 
painted the madonnas of art, launched Levi- 
athans on which men go down to- the seas, and 
constructed all the palaces and workshops of the 
nation. We must not, therefore, forget the im- 
mense potentiality there is in taking the hand 
of the child to train it to useful service, to 
generous gifts, and to guide and direct in the 
ways in which they should go, these leaders 
of future years. 

In the last quarter of a century, systematic 
giving in all of our churches and to all benevo- 
lent and eleemosynary institutions, has in- 
creased many hundreds and thousands percent. 
This increase has been more notable in the past 
decade than formerly. The effort on the part 
of church leaders and organized workers to 
place envelopes in the hands of every child of a 
given group, and to train that child, with his 
own hand, at stated intervals, to put his offer- 
ing where it will do the most good — this 
method has brought up for us a generation of 
men and women who know how to give ; and 
the vast benevolent and missionary programs 
of our day are made possible by this training 
of the hand. Of course, it is not the hand 
alone that is trained ; it is the mind and heart 
trained to direct the hand ; but the figure of our 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



61 



text is subtly suggestive of the mighty power 
over individual, communal, and even national 
destinies when a child's hand is placed in ours. 

A little fellow has just arrived in the home. 
A little dimpled, pink hand is closed round with 
the warm, strong, brown fingers of the father. 
It is a symbol of the fact that God has laced 
those delicate fingers of the baby through the 
sinuous man-fingers of the father, that the 
father should lead that child in the way in 
which it should go. It is a divine commission, 
and it works both ways ; for human experience 
bears out the testimony of the Scriptures, that 
" a little child shall lead them." 

Some of us will remember that inspiring ad- 
dress the late Bishop John H. Vincent, of the 
Methodist Church, used to deliver so effectively 
and which he called " That Boy." Surely no 
one who heard the eloqeunt and gifted Bishop 
will ever forget the picture he drew of the 
father on a Sabbath morning taking his little 
son by the hand and leading him to the sanc- 
tuary. The symbolic conversation was as 
follows : 

The Boy — " Father, what a large building ! " 
The Father — " Yes, my son, it is God's house." 

They enter the church. 
The Boy— " Father, look at all the people." 



62 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 



The Father — " Yes, my son, they are God's 
people." 

The Boy — " Look, father, what a big book there is 

on the little table." 
The Father — " Yes, my son, it is God's book and 

the man standing behind the little table is God's 

man who will read God's word to us and tell us 

of God's love." 

There are in each and every community a 
goodly number of God-fearing men who thus 
take their children by the hand and lead them 
to the house of prayer. There is little need to 
fear for that community and nation which has 
enough men of that kind in it, for they will lead 
future lawyers, future doctors, preachers, bank- 
ers, artists, artisans, merchants, teachers, in the 
way in which they should go. It is a wonder- 
ful thing to be able to put our hands upon the 
hands of our children. 

I suppose, so far as a logical conclusion is 
concerned, our sermon is ended. I cannot 
bring my remarks to a close, however, without 
reminding you that all this is exactly what our 
Lord Jesus Christ Himself did for man. He 
came and assumed our form; He accommo- 
dated Himself to our dimensions. He spoke 
our human speech. He saw and felt our needs 
from our point of view. He takes us by the 
hand and leads us through all the tortuous and 



HOW TO RAISE THE DEAD 63 



perilous ways into the eternal city, into the 
house of God, not made with hands eternal in 
the heaven. 

/^VH, Master, in Thine infinite mercy, Thou 
dost still tabernacle with us, for Thou 
hast promised to be with us always, even unto 
the end of the world. Thou knowest our needs, 
even better than we know them. Thou under- 
standest our thoughts afar off. We pray thee 
to grant unto us wisdom to be led of Thee, and 
to lead others as Thou dost lead us ; and having 
led us in this earthly pilgrimage, bring us, we 
pray Thee, our hands clasped in Thine, to that 
eternal and blessed estate where there is fulness 
of expression and ever enlarging opportunities 
of service and of development. Amen. 



V 



" THE CURE FOR THE TROUBLED 
HEART " 

"Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in 
God, believe also in me." — John xiv.i. 

WE have the power to banish trouble and 
worry from our hearts. Jesus calmly 
commands us to do* so. He would not 
issue a foolish command, and such a command 
certainly would be foolish if it were impossible 
to execute it. Such a command may have 
sounded impossible to the disciples ; it seems ab- 
surd to some modern troubled hearts. " How," 
they asked, " how can one control his fears, his 
sorrows, his troubles? " 

There have been and still are widely varying 
conceptions of the person of Jesus, But I dare 
assert that no one has ever seriously questioned 
His knowledge of the workings of the human 
mind and heart. The profound statement of 
John, " He knew what was in man," has been 
ratified by the testimony and the experience of 
men of all succeeding centuries. It is well for 
us to begin with this concession, therefore — 

64 



CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART " 65 



that when Jesus commands us to control our 
fears, to banish our troubles, He is issuing a 
command which we are competent to obey. No 
need for us to say, " But I can no more help 
worrying than I can help breathing.' 9 Jesus 
calmly assumes that our emotions are under our 
control. He forbids anger, He commands us 
to love, He plainly states that our thoughts 
must be pure, and He exhorts us to expel greed 
and envy. Not only our outward acts, but even 
our broodings, our moods, our very outlook 
upon life, all are controllable. 

A famous schism in these modern days is 
based upon just this very power and the neglect 
of most professing Christians to use the power; 
for in its ultimate analysis, what is the minor 
premise of Christian Science other than that 
we can control the mind and through it control 
the functions, physiological and pathological, of 
our body. So far as I have been able to un- 
derstand the Christian Scientists, they have no 
great concern for the kingdom of God as we 
conceive it, no great passion for social right- 
eousness, and no desire to snatch men as 
brands from the burning; but rather do they 
dwell upon an individual and personal triumph 
over all ills that may, can, and do affect us, 
body, mind, or spirit, here or hereafter. Why 



66 " CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART 



should Christians who are more orthodox 
along other lines be less orthodox along this 
line? 

A gloomy Christian is a contradiction of 
terms, and the proverbial long-faced church 
member, in so far as that individual now exists, 
is a standing proclamation of doubt on the part 
of the believer of the power vested in him to 
rise superior to the ordinary troubles of life. 
On the other hand, you and I have met so many 
genuine Christians who have triumphed over 
their troubles that we have visible and concrete 
evidence of the fact that we too can triumph 
and should triumph and, if we use our God- 
given powers and privileges aright, we shall 
triumph over all such things. 

I suppose this is what some of our friends 
mean by the " Victorious Life." Certainly if 
we are living by faith and walking daily in the 
light of His countenance, inspired and strength- 
ened by His Holy Spirit, our lives should be 
" victorious " ; or as the old hymn says : 

" If our love were but more simple, 
We should take him at his word, 
And our lives would be all sunshine, 
In the sweetness of the Lord." 

Jesus, however, in issuing this command f ol- 



u CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART M 67 



lows it with another command ; or it may be, as 
in the old version, not a command but a decla- 
ration that we believe in God. It is immaterial 
to our thought just here whether we translate 
this second clause as indicative or imperative 
mode. We may see clearly that Jesus is giving 
His disciples, and through them is giving us, 
an insight into the workings of faith in the 
heart of man, so that he may know how to 
banish trouble. It is as if He said, " You must 
not let your heart be troubled: I know it is 
very difficult for you to control your emotions 
and to master your moods, so I will remind 
you that you are to do this through a knowl- 
edge of and a reliance upon the fact that ye 
believe in God." 

Just consider what it would mean if we truly 
believed in God. Not in Mr. Brittling's de- 
natured-God, not in the limited divinity who 
desires good for His children before He is able 
to banish ills from them ; but in a genuine God. 
The true God is omniscient and omnipotent, 
and He " doeth according to His will in the 
army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of 
the earth ; and none can stay His hand, or say 
unto Him, What doest Thou? " Yet with all 
this wisdom and might and power the God in 
Whom we are to believe if our hearts are to be 



68 " CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART 



free from trouble is long-suffering and merci- 
ful and loving and of tender compassion. 

I am persuaded that few thoughtful people 
today would desire to be set down as atheists. 
There was a statement in one of our better-class 
magazines a few years ago to the effect that 
any cadet at our National Military Academy 
who upon matriculating declared himself to be 
an atheist, was excused from all Chapel exer- 
cises. The writer went on to say that it was a 
rare thing for any of these fine young men, 
with their already highly trained minds, to de- 
clare that they were atheists. There have been 
times when men were theoretically atheists, but 
it is not theoretical and philosophical atheism 
which blights men today. It is a far subtler 
and therefore more dangerous practical athe- 
ism ; namely, the atheism which leaves the law 
and love of God out of account in all the mo- 
tives and movements of one's life and of the 
large movements of history. It is as if one 
should say, " Oh, yes, I believe in God as a 
being who has made possible this stage of life 
upon which we are playing our parts, but He is 
only mildly interested in the show, and will 
neither applaud nor blame whether our part is 
comedy or tragedy, whether we play ill or 
well." Such a conception of God as this could 



N CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART " 69 



not be held by those who observe the teachings 
of history. Moreover in the world of nature 
even a savage could see the might and power of 
deity. There has something irreplaceable gone 
out of the life and soul of the man who no 
longer feels awq when he contemplates the 
might and power which are generated in the 
divine dynamos and which from some source 
across the unwired abysses of space, hold the 
worlds and flaming suns as if in the fingers of 
a deft magician. 

In simpler times, men felt the awe and ma- 
jesty, the power and glory of God in the light- 
ning flash, in the rolling clouds, in the storm 
winds, in the thunder that reverberated and 
" seemed to shake the spheres," in the wild 
lashings of the wintry seas. We of these mod- 
ern days observe the workings of power on a 
far vaster scale. Earth with her satellite and 
her sister planets swinging in majestic ellipses 
around our sun; that sun with its titan brood 
swimming through infinite space around some 
great central orb or groups of orbs ; while flit- 
ting in and out like humming birds visiting 
flowers, the eerie comets come and go. The 
astro-physicists bring us the result of their in- 
tricate calculations, of their spectrum-analyses, 
of their measuring and weighing and chemical 



70 - CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART " 

assorting of stars and suns. They announce to 
us that a Betelgeuse or a Canopus are so vast 
in their dimensions that were either a hollow 
sphere and our sun placed at its center, the 
earth could still revolve in an orbit its present 
size and not exceed the limits of the surface of 
that inconceivable mass of molten matter and 
flaming gas. The mind falls back upon itself 
and we find it saying, "If there is a Power 
which has created all this, if there is a Being 
who guides and controls it, then, at least in a 
physical sense, He is the Almighty." His 
power is absolutely infinite. 

We are, I think, therefore, in no frame of 
mind to deny the power of God in the material 
world. But whether we would be so willing to 
admit that power in the affairs of men, in the 
rise and fall of nations, in battles, and in ethnic 
transmigrations, is perhaps another question. 
Yet when our Saviour tells His disciples that 
they are to banish trouble because they believe 
in God, He would be giving them, in His use 
of the name of deity, the conception of God 
known to their fathers and proclaimed by their 
prophets. This conception of deity would be 
one of intimate association with His people. 
He would be a God who makes promises of 
endless mercies through His bow set in the 



CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART " 71 



heavens and pointed out to Noah as token of a 
covenant. He would be the God who led Abra- 
ham from Ur of the Chaldees. He would be 
the God who protected Joseph when sold into 
slavery in Egypt, and who brought him 
through all the dangers and set him near the 
throne of Pharoah. He would be the God who 
spoke to Moses and revealed to him the divine 
law. He would be the God of whom David 
sang and upon whose laws he meditated in the 
night season. He would be the God who for 
the sacred city's continued hardness of heart 
brought Nebuchadnezzar and swept Jerusalem, 
as some chess-man from a giant chess board, 
into his hand. He would be the God of Isaiah's 
commission, of Ezekiel's glorious visions, of 
Daniel's high triumphs. Not one of Jesus' im- 
mediate hearers would doubt for an instant that 
God ruled among men, as well as exercised His 
power in nature. Their philosophy of history 
could probably be summed up in the words of 
Joseph, " Ye sold me hither ; for God did send 
me before you to preserve life," and that God 
so overrules even the weaknesses and wicked- 
ness of men that these too work out a far more 
abundant and exceeding weight of glory. They 
would be in a position to accept, when stated to 
them, as Paul at a later time did state that, " All 



72 " CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART 



things work together for good to them that love 
God, to them who are the called according to 
his purpose/' 

While the power and the wisdom of God 
could be discovered in nature, there would be 
little proof in natural theology of a God of love 
and mercy. Jesus, therefore, connects himself 
with this exhortation of faith. It would not be 
difficult for the disciples to believe in Jesus as a 
good man, kind-hearted, long-suffering, merci- 
ful. In fact, they would have many demonstra- 
tions of this. They would remember how 
Jesus took little children in His arms and ca- 
ressed and blessed them. They could recall His 
interest in the hungry multitudes, whom He 
would not send away until they were fed. 
They would not have forgotten the way in 
which He responded to the appeals of the blind 
beggar, of the ruler whose daughter lay so ill, 
of the leper who came wailing, " Lord, if thou 
wilt, thou canst make me clean/' They would 
remember, too, how on one occasion meeting a 
funeral procession, the Lord's heart had been 
touched by the sorrows of the poor widow of 
Nain ; and again how at the home of the two 
sisters in Bethany, He had wept with them in 
their sorrow over the death of Lazarus. They 
would remember the beautiful stories He had 



CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART " 73 



told of lost sheep and of straying sons. If then 
they could connect up the infinite power and 
majesty of God with this infinite tenderness 
and love of that friend and teacher, they would 
be in a position to say to their troubled hearts, 
" Be at rest : for the One who is gentler and 
sweeter and far more merciful than we have 
ever been, is also the One who is in unbroken 
touch with the source of all power. Because 
the Almighty is also the All-loving, we can 
surely trust Him to care for us, to bring us 
through all our dangers, to enable us to triumph 
over all our foes, and to banish even the fear 
of separation and death. 

This is one of the ends desired by the Sav- 
iour when in breaking to them the news that He 
soon must leave them, He reminds them that 
they need not fear for, just as they believe in 
Him as a friend, so they must believe in the 
eternal and invisible God as a friend. 

This message of comfort is undoubtedly 
needed by you and me. There is a haunting 
fear, a sense of impending doom that is com- 
mon to the race, when unsustained by faith. 
Shakespeare's " Juliet " expressed a universal 
sentiment when she exclaimed, " O God, I have 
an ill-divining heart." But here our religion 
can help and should help : when problems that 



74 " CURE FOR TROUBLED HEART " 

we are unable to solve face us, when steep and 
rugged roads are to be traveled, when burdens 
are very heavy, when sorrows threaten to sub- 
merge us, when long partings are about to take 
place, the words of Jesus should speak comfort 
to us. " Let not your heart be troubled. Be- 
lieve in God, believe also in Me." We should 
be able to rise in response thereto and joyfully 
exclaim, " I know whom 1 have believed, and 
am persuaded that he is able to keep that which 
I have committed unto him against that day." 

" We know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air. 
We only know we cannot drift 
Beyond his love and care." 

(~\, Thou who art our Friend, we rejoice that 



Thy hand is able to save and that Thy 
heart yearns for our salvation in our need, in 
our sin, in our sorrow, in any and every con- 
dition of life. We turn unto Thee for we know 
that Thou wilt protect us and bring us unto 
Thyself. Amen. 




VI 



THE HILLS OF HELP 

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from 
whence cometh my help!' — Psalm cxxi.i. 

THE singer of this beautiful hymn of 
hope may have lived in Judea's happiest 
days. He may have been one of a band 
of pilgrims who were going up to Jerusalem to 
worship. He would have travelled weary miles 
along dusty roads, hungry and thirsty and 
faint. He would have reached the highest place 
in the road which wound over the hills that sur- 
round Jerusalem and for the first time his eyes 
would be enraptured by beholding the glorious 
city so dear to every child of his race. In- 
structed in the history of his people and the 
geography of his native soil, he would remem- 
ber a sacred hill upon which long, long ago Ab- 
raham had in spirit offered up Isaac. He would 
see crowned with the temple that eminence 
which had been so important a stage in the re- 
ligious life of the children of Abraham. He 
would associate with some great event in the 
national and spiritual life of his people, each 

75 



76 THE HILLS OF HELP 



and every part of the sacred city. He would 
reflect that from this hill or that one, God had 
undoubtedly spoken to his people. His eyes be- 
held the very hills whence help visibly had 
come. He would reflect that his help was not 
in these things, in these hallowed localities, but 
his help was in the name of the Lord who made 
heaven and earth. 

It may be that the singer lived in " less hap- 
pier " days ; in times when armies were march- 
ing against his land; in hours of battle, siege, 
and storm. The army of some heathen king 
may be encamped upon those hills which had so 
delighted the sweet singer who had cried, " I 
was glad when they said unto me, Let us go 
into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand 
within thy gates, O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is 
builded as a city that is compact together/' 

Those in the besieged city could hardly ex- 
pect friendly help to come breaking through the 
camps of the beleaguering hosts. There were 
probably no friendly nations to help them;, and 
even if there were how could such nations 
break through the cordon of steel and come to 
the rescue? Again the patriot must look 
within. Finding garrisons barely large enough 
to withstand assault and with no reserve forces 
with which to make sallies and drive the enemy 



THE HILLS OF HELP 77 



away, he is forced again to see his only help 
coming as in other times, from the Lord, who 
made heaven and earth, and whose presence 
with His people is typified by the temple- 
crowned summit of the sacred hill, or by the 
summits of the other eminences, each one elo- 
quent of what God had done for His people 
and of what He yet could and would do. In 
the triumphant burst of faith under these con- 
ditions he cried, " I will lift up mine eyes unto 
the hills." 

Far away from Judeah on the banks of the 
Euphrates in Babylonia, a captive poet may 
have lifted his eyes filled with longing in the 
direction from whence his people had come. 
No blue, beautiful hills made graceful curves 
or gnarled outlines against his horizon. As far 
as he could see stretched the level plains of 
Mesopotamia. Yet in his vision he saw the 
sacred city of his people, set round about with 
inviolable hills, itself nursing the noblest 
mounts and the most sacred spots of all the 
world. Suddenly the soul miraged against the 
horizon the vision of this city, the promise that 
had been made to it and to his people, the pleas- 
ant ways of Zion, and the temple-crowned hills. 
Gone for the moment was the feeling of de- 
pression; gone, the sense of slavery; gone the 



78 THE HILLS OF HELP 



captive's chains, and he could cry, " I will lift 
up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh 
my help." 

Hills have ever been the sources of inspira- 
tion to men of poetic minds. The ancient 
Greek saw a cloud-capped Olympus outlining 
its graceful slopes against the azure sky. To 
his mind the summit was the abode of the im- 
mortal gods. The Norseman saw his misty 
hills not as gloomy and forbidding but as beau- 
tiful and alluring. There Odin held his court 
whence flowed the streams of poesy which 
earthly poets drank. There Thor forged his 
thunderbolts and hurled his battle hammer as 
the friend and champion of men. From these 
poetic conceptions to our scientific knowledge 
of the ozone-laden cooling airs which flow 
down the sides of our own beloved forest-clad 
mountains, men have felt helped, uplifted, 
strengthened by looking up unto the hills. All 
which things, dear friends, are an allegory for 
us. We may be living in happy days, in a 
pleasant land : it should be our great privilege 
and joy to go up to the places of worship, the 
houses where men today " praise God from 
whom all blessings flow." They are to us as 
truly the hill of Zion as was the temple-crowned 
hill in old Jerusalem. Upon our lips, bubbling 



THE HILLS OF HELP 79 



from the deepest places of our hearts, should 
be the joy of song: " I will lift up mine eyes 
unto the hills." 

In another figure, we may be feeling the siege 
of these times of stress and storm. Conscious 
of our oneness in Christ's Church, we are also 
conscious, of the evil hosts which camp round 
about us day and night and which would de- 
stroy us and our sacred Jerusalem if they could. 
Vain is it for us to look for help from human 
re-enforcements. Vain is it for us to scan the 
distant horizon or the dust clouds which be- 
speak oncoming battalions which shall rout our 
enemies and free us from their threat. Our 
help, as with the psalmist, is from within. 
Nay, it is from above, through those who are 
within ; from above to be manifested by those 
who are upon the hills of our city of God. We 
too must be able to shout the note of victory, 
" I will lift up mine eyes unto* the hills, from 
whence cometh my help." 

Some of us may be like unto the captive 
Judean in f ar-off lands. God turn the spiritual 
eyes of all such in the direction of His eternal 
city! God mirror by spiritual processes, upon 
the skies of the soul, the glories of Jerusalem 
the Golden, the city of the Great King. God 
cause all such captives, with yearning and eag- 



80 THE HILLS OF HELP 



erness, to turn their faces in the direction of 
that city, and to cry, " I will lift up mine eyes 
unto the hills, from whence cometh my help/' 

Within the sacred precincts of the city of our 
divine religion, great hills of help still rise. 
Some of these may suggest themselves to us in 
the names and through the functions which 
far-famed mountains have occupied in the spir- 
itual history that is our common possession. 

Will you permit me to alter my theme, and 
bring a fuller application of the thought of help 
which we get from the hills by mentioning 
some mountains which loom high in Bible lore ? 
These are not all geographically in the capital 
city of Judah; but they are all within the city 
of God, as well as upon the map of His world. 
They are not mere mounds of rock and earth ; 
they also, from sacred associations, are spirit- 
ual hills. 

High lifts itself into the Arabian desert 
skies, where 

" Earth's highest yearns to meet a star," 

the rocky crags, the mist-covered pinnacles, the 
cloud-enshrined glories of Sinai. There God 
gave the moral law; and everyone of us who 
looks unto the hills for help, looks unto this 
Mount of the Law. Let us not accustom our- 



THE HILLS OF HELP 81 



selves to thinking that this is a mount which 
means limitation, which lays burdens upon us, 
which causes us to be " cabin'd, crib'd, confin'd, 
bound in." The law binds no shackles upon 
the soul other than the golden fetters that hold 
us to God. The law tells us how He who made 
us would have us to live. Because He knows 
us and loves us He has given us the way in 
which, so living, we may have the fullest ex- 
pression of life, the completest joy of existence, 
the noblest expression for time and for eternity 
of all those marvellous benefits and powers 
which He has bestowed upon us. Perhaps 
there is a spiritual desert " some'ers east of 
Suez, where there ain't no Ten Command- 
ments. " Perhaps there is a moral desert in this 
noble land of ours, vast, parched, arid, deadly, 
where green and beautiful things are never 
seen; where bleaching skeletons and drifting 
sand dunes reveal themselves as the cemeteries 
of the soul. It is to no such place as this that 
the soul may look for help. It is rather to the 
thunder-shaken slopes of Sinai that we look. 
Yea, rather, it is to that other Mount upon 
which Jesus sat when He " opened His mouth 
and taught " His disciples ; where He re-echoed 
and re-enforced and revivified and respiritual- 
ized the statutes and commandments which 



82 THE HILLS OF HELP 



God had given through Moses ; where He cried, 
" You have heard it said by them of old-time, 
but I say unto you " ; where He spoke in a 
voice that reached further than the noisiest 
storm on Mount Hor ; where the winds caught 
up His words and took them, and is still bear- 
ing them to forest glades, to dark valleys, to 
teeming cities, to islands of the seas ! Oh, my 
brethren, let us lift up our eyes unto the Hill 
of the Law and the Hill of Jesus Sermon 
Mount, whence cometh our help. 

Another hill of help within our spiritual 
Jerusalem, is the one suggested to us by that 
Olivet where we read that Jesus spent His 
nights after arduous days of teaching in the 
temple. For we may be sure Olivet in those 
nights was a shrine of prayer. Men have vied 
with one another in proclaiming the value, in 
extolling the beauty and the glory, of prayer. 
Familiar as they are, perhaps no one has ever 
more splendidly expressed the Christian's belief 
in prayer than is found in those oft-quoted 
lines of Tennyson: 

" More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy 
voice 

Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
For what are men better than sheep or goats, 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 



THE HILLS OF HELP 83 



If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them 
friend ?" 

But now, alas, many voices tell us that prayer 
at best has but a reflex value ; that any objective 
value it may have is due to its power, if it is 
oral, of producing in the minds of the hearers 
a state of devotion ; but, so far as any approach 
it may have, to the ear of God, it may as well 
not be spoken. To such the heavens are as 
brass. To* such there are no " sweet heavens " 
whence mercies fall like life-giving showers. 
To such the universe is in the drifting tides of 
chance and change without a guiding Mind or 
Hand: 

Flower and cloud and sun and star. 

Beast and bird and conquering man, 
All but chemic compounds are, 

Mixed by chance since time began. 

To such we dwell for a few hectic days in a 
" charnel house, full of specters and dead men's 
bones." Ah! as one has most sagely said : 

" What is man 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast; no more/' 

But as we lift our eyes to the hill of prayer 
our belief is that God's ear is ever open to hear 
and His heart ever tender to grant our petitions 



84 THE HILLS OF HELP 



in accordance with His own great wisdom. 
Not only within the walls of the city itself, but 
scattered over the land of Palestine, were places 
made forever sacred because there men of God 
had w r restled in prayer with the angels, as did 
Jacob at Bethel and as did Jesus on Olivet. 
Let us not fail, my friends, to turn our 
thoughts to those places whence the horizons of 
the soul arise, and let us cry in the language of 
this ancient litany, " I will lift up mine eyes to 
the hills." 

In the words of a stately old hymn we some- 
times sing, 

" There is a green hill far away without a 
city wall, 

Where the dear Lord was crucified, Who 
died to save us all." 

Though Golgotha was not within the hal- 
lowed limits of the city of David, it is certainly 
within the holy walls of the spiritual city of the 
Church of Christ. It is superlatively the hill 
from whence cometh our help. There is no 
human explanation why this is true; yet, even 
as the dying thief turned with renewal of hope 
in the last moments of his sorrowful and sin- 
stained earthly life to his dying Companion on 
the cross, so men everywhere have looked upon 
that tragic figure and have felt a new hope. 



THE HILLS OF HELP 85 



The man with the ripest training of University 
routine; the unlettered man in the darkened 
corners of the world; the mother who with 
breaking heart and tear-suffused eyes bids her 
soldier son " Good-by " ; and the aged wreck of 
humanity who looks back over an ill-spent life; 
— in short, all classes and conditions of men 
looking up from all circumstances and environ- 
ments of life, and every quarter of the world, 
have felt a thrill of new life, of pulsating hope 
as of the dawning of a new r and better day, 
when their eyes have rested on cross-crowned 
Calvary. 

This is the hill of help: this is where God, 
stooping down, touched man's deepest sorrows, 
sweetened his bitterest cup, assuaged his sharp- 
est pains. I point you to this hill today and beg 
of you that you look up unto the hill from 
whence cometh your help. 

" Who love Thee most, at Thy dear Cross 
Will truest, Lord, abide; 
Make Thou that cross our only hope 
O Jesus Crucified." 

F) LESSED be Thy name, O Thou, spirit of 
mercy, love and truth, that Thou hast 
given us spiritual eyes with which we may per- 
ceive those spiritual summits which shine with 



86 THE HILLS OF HELP 



Thine undying light. May everyone of us to- 
day lift up his eyes unto the hill where Thy 
moral law has been proclaimed ; where he may 
approach Thee in prayer; where One suffers 
for him and suffers not in vain. In His name, 
Amen ! 



VII 



THE GOSPEL MESSAGE IN A WORLD 
OF SPIRITUAL DRY BONES 

"Again he said to me, Prophesy upon these bones 
and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word * 
of the Lord." — Ezekiix xxxvn.4. 

EZEKIEL has been called the first dog- 
matic theologian. Behind his vision 
there is a constructive doctrine which is 
arranged in logical order. There are times 
when it is almost true that he says, " firstly, 
secondly," and so on. The Reverend John 
Skinner in the Expositor's Bible, says of him, 
" In so far as it is the business of a theologian 
to exhibit the logical connection of the ideas 
which express man's relation to God, Ezekiel 
more than any other prophet may claim the 
title." Again he says, " What is specially re- 
markable is the manner in which the doctrines 
are bound together in the unity of a system." 
We find that there is this logical and systematic 
arrangement of thought underneath his descrip- 
tion of his vision " of the valley which was full 
of bones." 

In their benighted and hopeless condition, the 
87 



88 THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 

children of Judah were in despair. Their cap- 
tivity in a strange land, the deserted streets and 
temple at Jerusalem,, and their hopeless pros- 
pect, overwhelmed them. They cried with the 
poignancy of the Psalmist, " Our bones are 
dried and our hope is lost." Such a condition 
of mind, such a lack of faith, need cause no 
wonder, when we remember the might of their 
great conqueror Nebuchadnezzar, and their im- 
potence to raise even a riot much less a success- 
ful rebellion. When we call to mind how far 
Babylon lay from Jerusalem, we can easily un- 
derstand why the melancholy threnody of the 
ancient psalmist rose to their minds : " Our 
bones are scattered at the grave's mouth, as 
when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the 
earth." 

Such then is the condition of his people when 
Ezekiel undertakes to comfort and inspire 
them. From long brooding upon their hard 
condition, and with the somber refrain of 
David ringing in his mind, he is in condition 
to cast his thought in the picturesque form of 
this vision. 

There would be to Ezekiel and to his hearers, 
the historical and national explanation of the 
vision. Such an explanation would be first and 
paramount. It might indeed exclude other and 



THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 89 



deeper interpretations from the minds of the 
first hearers and readers. It is safe to assume 
that such exclusion of wider and deeper aims 
was not true in regard to Ezekiel. Matthew 
Henry reminds us that this vision not only 
prophesies the reassembling of the chosen peo- 
ple and their re-establishment in their Holy 
Land, but also that it prophesies the resurrec- 
tion of souls from the death of sin, the resur- 
rection of the body at the last day, and also the 
resurrection of the Gospel Church. Today, my 
theme is something in the nature of a foot-note 
to the third thought just mentioned, for herein 
lies in orderly arrangement the conditions 
which surround the gospel preacher and the 
divinely ordered process by which he is to do 
his work. 

You recall outlines of the vision. The Lord 
takes the prophet out and sets him in the midst 
of the valley full of bones. He lays emphasis 
upon the fact that they are not only dead but 
long since dry and scattered. He asks the 
prophet if these bones can live, and the prophet 
replies, " O Lord God, Thou knowest." He 
then commands Ezekiel to prophesy upon the 
bones, and when Ezekiel obeyed " there was a 
noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came 
together, bone to his bone." Then flesh and 



90 THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 



skin covered the bones, but the bodies remained 
lifeless. Again the divine command came and 
in obedience Ezekiel prophesied unto the winds 
and these breathed upon the bodies " and breath 
came into them and they lived, and stood up 
upon their feet, an exceeding great army." 

The analogy between a valley full of dead 
bones and the world in which the gospel mes- 
sage was first proclaimed is not far fetched. 
Likewise the analogy between such a valley and 
the world in which the gospel message is 
preached and lived today is very clear. Hu- 
manly speaking, the unevangelized portion of 
humanity seem to* be about as responsive to the 
gospel message as those bones might have 
seemed to Ezekiel; and yet God sends us out, 
as He sent this older prophet, to proclaim our 
message regardless of the fact that it does seem 
a hopeless task. Moreover, the passage makes 
it clear that the prophet, the preacher, the in- 
dividual Christian whose life is a prophecy of 
the gospely — all these are made to acknowledge 
that the condition does seem hopeless. God did 
more than set Ezekiel down in the midst of the 
valley of dry bones. He took him and made 
him walk about amongst those mournful re- 
mains of what once were men. He compelled 
Ezekiel to acknowledge that there is no power 



THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 91 



or ingenuity in man which can revive them. 
He asks him the quenstion, " Can the bones 
live ? " The answer is the safe one for us to 
make when God sends us, as individuals or as a 
Church, to preach His gospel in the dessicated 
death-valleys of the world. He does not an- 
swer, " The dead bones cannot live " ; nor does 
he presume to say that the dead bones can live. 
He puts the matter wholly into the Almighty 
hands :— " O Lord God, Thou knowest." 

When this attitude of mind is ours we are in 
a position to hear, as Ezekiel heard, this com- 
mand, " Prophesy upon these bones and say 
unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of 
the Lord." " Prophesy " means " preach, 
speak out, proclaim so that they can hear it." 
Disregard the fact that there are no ears to 
hear, no< brain to receive, no heart to feel; 
preach the word; insist that the bones must 
hear the word of the Lord. Such, brethren 
and friends, is our mission. Dr. Patten, of 
Princeton, used to* say, " The Church exists for 
propaganda," which, I take it, means that the 
Church has as its raison d'etre the proclamation 
of good news, the preaching of the gospel. 

We call those men who have been educated 
in theology and ordained to the gospel minis- 
try, " ambassadors of Christ," — " preachers of 



92 THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 



the word." But every believer is a preacher of 
the gospel, every church is an evangelist. Some 
of us may not be very busily engaged in the 
King's Business ; but such is our mission, our 
duty, nonetheless. Each of us should proclaim 
the message to the deaf, dry world around us 
by the actions of our lives, by the words of our 
mouths. Never mind how improbable or im- 
possible may appear any results: never mind 
how ridiculous it may seem to us to prophesy 
over dead bones; the divine command comes, 
" Preach the gospel to* every creature." Ezek- 
iel might have stopped to argue with the Lord. 
He might, for instance, have remonstrated 
against being asked to do a foolish thing. It 
does look simple and silly, as worldly wisdom 
would use these terms, for a man, no matter 
how eloquent his speech, to walk into a lonely 
valley, gruesome with the stark bones that lie 
here and there, and to* lift up his voice in an 
appeal for them to hear the word of the Lord. 

" Can storied urn or animated bust 

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? 
Can honor's voice provoke the silent dust, 
Or flattery soothe the dull, cold ear of 
death?" 

It looks equally as foolish for men to preach 
the message of salvation to cannibals in the 



THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 93 



New Hebrides, to squalid black races on the 
west coast of Africa, to self-satisfied and com- 
placent Chinese on the shore of the Yellow Sea, 
or to " Bowery Toughs," or thugs, or fallen 
women on the streets of New York or Chi- 
cago. For that matter the evangelistic message 
may seem foolish and useless in our most Chris- 
tian communities and in the churches where 
practically everyone is a professing Christian. 
But John G. Paton did not argue that God was 
asking a foolish thing when God sent him to 
preach to> the dry bones in those islands of the 
Pacific. Nor did Livingstone and his succes- 
sors feel that way when they heard the com- 
mand to proclaim the message " somewhere 
in " the dark continent. Scores and even hun- 
dreds of modern Ezekiels, prophet and prophet- 
ess, have lifted their voices in complacent 
China; in shrewd, pagan Japan; in Water 
Street and Pacific Garden Missions ; nor should 
the pastor or officers or members of the most 
devout and consecrated group of worshippers 
feel that it is no> longer needful to preach the 
old gospel in their church. Wherever it is 
preached are always results. Let me emphasize 
especially the necessity of heart-searching 
preaching, both from the pulpit and from the 
pew, in our supposedly highly religious com- 



94 THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 



munities. For an evangelist to visit a well- 
regulated parish, with a faithful pastor, may 
seem a work of supererogation. Yet, some 
years ago I knew such an evangelist to be 
moved to describe certain conditions which 
might be obtaining in the lives of some of his 
hearers. The message " found " four young 
men, all of whom had been for years nominal 
members of the Church but who were at that 
time living in a hell of debauchery and licen- 
tiousness; who were in fact just plotting and 
planning for a crime which would have sent 
them all to the penitentiary. Thank God that 
the message found them in time! Thank God 
that we have still the Ezekiel spirit which does 
not quarrel with God's command, " Prophesy 
unto these dry bones." 

The result of this prophesying was immedi- 
ate and startling. " Bones came together, bone 
to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews 
and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin 
covered them above: but there was no breath 
in them-." Here was everything about a human 
being except life and breath, except a soul. 
The stark bodies scattered about the valley 
were after all nothing but bodies. There was 
no spirit in them. We are reminded of the 
Ancient Mariner: 



THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 95 



" The many men so beautiful 
And they all dead did lie; 
And a thousand thousand slimy things 
Lived on and so did I." 

The prophet had obeyed the command that 
had been given him and his obedience had 
borne fruit. But something else must be done. 
Hence, the command : " Prophesy unto the 
wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the 
wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from 
the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon 
these slain, that they may live." The Old 
Testament word for " wind " and for " spirit " 
are the same. The prophet is commanded to 
invoke the airs of heaven, or, we may say, the 
spirit of God. It is only when God has 
breathed into man the breath of life that he 
becomes a living soul. It was only when, at 
the appeal of the prophet, winds came and 
breathed upon these men, that life returned to 
them. It was only when the prophetic utter- 
ances of men of God were followed by the be- 
lieving prayers of other faithful men that an- 
cient Judah lived again and had the power to 
return and rebuild Jerusalem. 

It is not sufficient that the minister deliver 
his message, that the Church utter its gospel, 
that the individual believer proclaim by his life 



96 THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 



the divine story of grace. These must be fol- 
lowed by prevailing prayer. We deliver our 
message by word and deed, and that message 
is sure to show some results. God has testified, 
" My word shall not return unto Me void but it 
shall accomplish that for which it is sent." 
And that for which it is sent is to arrest the 
attention, persuade the mind, convict the heart, 
touch and move the will. But all these things 
can happen and one still remain spiritually a 
dead body. They are a necessary preface or 
prologue to* that which is to* come. They are a 
part of the plan of salvation. They must never 
be underrated, much less over-looked. It is as 
impossible for the work of grace to take place in 
the heart which has not been touched, the mind 
which is not convinced and the will which is not 
moved, as it was for the winds of heaven to 
animate the bones in the valley, before these 
had joined themselves to their fellow and had 
been covered with sinews and flesh and skin. 

These things are not to be forgotten when 
we undertake our heaven-ordered task of con- 
verting the ungodly to the religion of Christ. 
Neither must we forget that when we have 
done our all there will be no life unless God's 
spirit breathes upon the sinner. Paraphrasing 
the ancient cry, " To your tents, O Israel," the 



THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 97 

message today is, " To your knees, O Church 
of God." In believing prayer, in fervent inter- 
cession at the throne of grace, in prophesying 
or appealing to the spirit of God to come and 
breathe upon the beautiful bodies which the 
first prophesy has laid before us — here are our 
greatest needs today. I am persuaded that 
there is no weakness in the pulpit as compared 
with the so-called " giants " of former times. 
I have read extensively the sermonic literature 
from the earliest times to our present day. I 
believe there was never a time when a genuine 
message was more persistently preached and 
more consistently lived than today. Why then 
do we not make greater progress ? Why in our 
denomination at large was there added to our 
rolls during the past year on a Profession of 
Faith, an average of about one new member for 
something like twenty who were already mem- 
bers ? With our elaborate evangelical and edu- 
cational machinery, why do we make such slow 
progress ? Is it not because intercessory prayer 
is almost a lost art? Who can think without 
being deeply moved of Moses praying that God 
will cut him ofif and blot his name out of the 
book of remembrance, if only he will spare Is- 
rael ? With the spirit of prayer therefore upon 
us, prophesying with our petitions that God's 



98 THE GOSPEL MESSAGE 



spirit will come upon the boys and girls, the 
youth and maidens, the unevangelized men and 
women in our community, in our state and na- 
tion, we shall certainly live to see marvelous 
results. 

As Ezekiel obeyed God's command both that 
he preach and that he pray, and obeying these 
commands saw in his vision the dead bodies be- 
come animated and rise and fill the valley, a 
great army of men; so shall the Church of 
Christ obeying His command to preach the gos- 
pel to every creature and obeying the other 
command to pray without ceasing, to be in- 
stant in prayer, to be fervent in spirit, — so shall 
the Church see the lifeless but beautiful bodies 
stand spiritually upon their feet, a mighty 
throng to be added to the armies of God. 

f~\ GOD, we thank Thee for the gospel mes- 
sage. We thank Thee that it reached us. 
We pray Thee that through us it may reach 
many others. We thank Thee for the coming 
and indwelling of Thy Holy Spirit. We thank 
Thee that Thou hast breathed into us the breath 
of life. We pray that we may be more earnest 
in our intercession in behalf of all those for 
whom Christ died. Amen. 



VIII 



" THE GREAT DE-SOCIALIZING 
DISEASE " 



"And Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day 
of his death, and dwelt in a several house." — II 
Chronicles xxvi.21. 



DISTINGUISHED essayist, Brander 



Matthews, has recently written an able 



defense of the utterer of platitudes. I 
for one am very grateful to the Columbia 
University professor. He gives me renewed 
courage to go on with a life-long habit of deal- 
ing in platitudinous but eternally essential 
truths. 

The first platitude which I desire to empha- 
size is that man is incurably a social being. 
There are some " hermit souls that dwell 
apart," but such are the exception. Saint An- 
thony for religious reasons, Timon of Athens 
for very irreligious reasons, and others for 
varying reasons, have cut themselves off from 
their fellows. Thousands who have read and 
greatly enjoyed Thoreau's " Walden," and were 
moved by its idyllic pages, have moaned with 
Byron : 




99 



100 " DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE " 



" Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness, 
With one fair spirit for my minister, 
That I might all forget the human race, 
And, hating no one, love but only her." 

Yet we may confidently assert that extremely 
few would enjoy the absolute solitude pictured 
by Thoreau and would, even in a short time, 
grow weary of the one fair ministering spirit 
of whom Byron sings. The proverbial old lady 
who proferred living in the crowded back 
streets of the city to being on a lonely farm, 
and justified her preference with the incontro- 
vertible assertion that " people are more inter- 
esting than stumps/' is a type of us all. We are 
interested in our fellows, and we want to be 
with our fellows. If proof of this were neces- 
sary, it could be found in the fact that the vast 
territory of the United States has not prevented 
the working of deep-rooted social laws from 
drawing men into congested communities, so 
that our last national census shows the urban 
population to have reached and passed that of 
the rural districts. 

A second platitude which I wish to empha- 
size today is that the disease of the soul which 
we call " sin " is the great separating force. If 
love is the tie that binds, then sin is the blade 
which cuts the tie. It is more than a blade — it 



" DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 99 101 

is a gradually widening wedge incessantly push- 
ing further and further apart, elements which 
should stand in closest intimacy, — in actual 
unity even. 

For our purpose, at this moment, it is not es- 
sential that we accept any Biblical or ecclesi- 
astical conception or definition of sin. Even 
the word itself may be set aside, if you prefer, 
and some other word used. It is, however, a 
short, convenient, and well-understood term. 
That much maligned and also much be-praised 
document, the Shorter Catechism, defines sin as 
" any want of conformity unto or transgression 
of the law of God." You may broaden the 
definition ; you may narrow it ; you may change 
it to suit your way of thinking, your scheme of 
things as you think they are ; but at least we can 
agree on this ; namely, that all through human 
history, in all lands, amongst all peoples, and in 
the lives of practically all individuals, there is 
ever present a disease of the soul which drives 
that soul from its best fellows, and consorts it 
with greed, envy, malice, hatred, impurity, 
murder, and I know not what other of hell's 
black brood. This thing, this impetus in the 
wrong direction, this sickness of the mind and 
soul, this leprosy of sin, has always been and 
ever will be a de-socializing power. This is not 



102 " DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 



the only charge which can be made against it, 
not the only way in which it can be convicted 
of treason against humanity. It is, however, 
the form or guise under which we view it 
today. 

Uzziah was a man of glorious accomplish- 
ments. We read in the twenty-sixth chapter of 
II Chronicles how he succeeded to the throne 
when but sixteen years of age, and how for the 
better part of fifty-two years his power was felt 
by all neighbouring nations. He fortified the 
city of Jerusalem and made it exceedingly 
strong. He enlarged the army, gave it better 
weapons of warfare, trained and led it to suc- 
cess. As the ancient chronicler says, " his 
name spread far abroad; for he was marvel- 
ously helped, till he was strong." 

It was just at this point, we read, that " his 
heart was lifted up to his destruction." We 
speak of the " times that try men's souls " ; the 
times which truly try the soul are not the times 
of hardship, of battling against apparently 
overwhelming enemies — they are rather the 
times of prosperity. Many a man has lived 
nobly and worked with high ideals, until suc- 
cess has come. Then, in the intoxication of 
praise or of money or of power, the heart has 
been lifted up to the man's destruction. Prob- 



" DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 99 103 



ably God keeps most of us poor, and in incon- 
spicuous positions, and devoid of much power, 
because most of us could not stand the test of 
great success. Uzziah was like the most of us 
then, in that he became over-presumptuous. He 
forgot to pray as the Psalmist prayed, " keep 
back thy servant also from presumptuous sins ; 
let them not have dominion over me." He 
sinned by presuming that he might usurp the 
place of the priest when God had set him to be 
the king. He was informed by courteously 
deferential but faithful and sincere men of God 
that this was not his office, that God had as- 
signed these high tasks to the sons of Aaron. 
Uzziah was very angry and we read that even 
while he was swinging the censer in his hand, 
presumably in the holy places of the temple, 
leprosy rose to his forehead, " And he hasted to 
go out, because the Lord had smitten him." 
His sin was the sin of pride and presumption, 
of overweaning self-esteem. He was com- 
pelled, as if he were a beggar, to go out from 
the face of man. He was isolated. He could 
no longer live in his palace and commune with 
princes and lords. He must dwell alone. His 
house was a separate, shunned pest house, 
where the flattering courtier dared not go. 
Your sin and mine may take a very different 



104 " DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE " 



form. But it is, in the degree and proportion 
of its heinousness, marking us with the leprosy 
which drives us out from actual and spiritual 
contact with our fellows. 

That is certainly one of the great charges 
which can be brought against sin. It drives a 
cutting and an ever-widening wedge between us 
and our brother. It not only separated Cain 
from Abel but it separated Cain from all other 
mankind. Wherever the spirit of Cain gets 
mastery of our spirits it drives us out as it 
drove Cain. Listen to his cry : " Behold, thou 
hast driven me out this day from the face of the 
earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I 
shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth ; 
and it shall come to pass, that every one that 
findeth me shall slay me." 

No apter illustration of this separating power 
may be found than is afforded by the divorce 
records of today. Social economists and Chris- 
tian workers not only deplore but are appalled 
at the shocking increase in divorce. Be it said 
that the disregard of the seventh Command- 
ment is not the only form of sin which is " di- 
viding asunder " those whom God hath joined 
together; or those who should have been joined 
by God. The sin of selfishness, the sin of lazi- 
ness, the sin of sheer indifference;, — these 



" DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE " 105 



things may be the power that drives you out 
from home and fireside, from brother and sis- 
ter, from wife or husband. The shocking 
disruption of so many modern homes; the 
alienation of those who should live in wedded 
self-helpfulness; the turning out innocent chil- 
dren as what we may inelegantly call " grass 
orphans " — all this is due to the desocializing 
power of sin over the heart. 

A gentleman spoke to me recently in confi- 
dence, concerning his domestic troubles. He 
built his wife a beautiful home, furnished it ac- 
cording to< her tastes, and lavished upon her 
anything and everything within reason which 
she asked. Now this gentleman laments that 
even the duties of directing the home, in which 
there are no children, have become so distaste- 
ful to his wife that she refuses longer to keep 
the house for him. Fine clothes, fine hotels, 
association with people of more or less 
" sporty " tendencies, the theatre, the moving- 
picture place, the glamour and glare of the 
great department stores, nightly indulgence in 
modern dances,- — these things have so absorbed 
her interests that she has no time or taste for 
the plain, home-like virtues which should be in 
any good wife. The scoffing cynic might dis- 
miss such a case with the question : What can 



106 " DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 



you expect of a woman with a fourth reader 
intellect and the soul of a jay-bird? As for the 
intellect, it could have been better had there 
been less vanity in it ; and pride and selfishness 
have contributed to the distorting and dwarfing 
of her soul to the proportion and propensities 
in that highly decorated but also highly de- 
testable thief and murderer of the feathered 
race, the blue-jay. 

Whether it is among friends in the commun- 
ity, individuals in the same family, or groups in 
the same state or nation ; or whether it is as be- 
tween one race or people and other people or 
race; when this separation, — and consequent 
bitterness, hatred, and antagonism, — comes, we 
may be sure " sin lieth at the door/' — nay, that 
sin has risen as a leprosy to the forehead. 
When there was Civil War in this country, the 
sin of slavery was the power that drove the sec- 
tions apart. When the world broke out in its 
most deadly war, it was the sin of race hatred, 
together with the sin of greed, which was the 
disrupting power breaking up the family of na- 
tions. So it has been, so it ever will be, until 
that time foreseen by John has arrived, and it is 
literally true that " there is no more sin." 

The dividing asunder of a man from his fel- 
lows is due in some measure to the fact that sin 



DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE " 107 



has blinded his eyes to his own limitations. 
The Uzziah who presumptuously essayed to 
enter the sanctuary and who theatrically swayed 
the censer and doubtless intoned the ritual of 
worship, was a far less clear-thoughted man 
than the Uzziah of earlier days. In a parallel 
record, in the second book of Kings, Uzziah, 
who is there called Azariah, is given the en- 
dorsement, " And he did that which was right 
in the sight of the Lord, according to all that 
his father Amaziah had done; save that the 
high places were not removed : the people sacri- 
ficed and burnt incense still in the high places." 
Here is an insight into the inward character of 
Uzziah. He was not absolutely and wholly de- 
voted to the Lord. If there were no actual out- 
ward alliances with heathenism, there was an 
inward complacency toward them. In these 
earliest times the blade of sin had not cut far, 
the wedge of sin had not been driven home, and 
Uzziah's outward life was still consonant with 
his own best self — with his own ideal self. 

Herein lie warnings for every one of us. 
Perhaps most of us have been somewhat 
shocked at those words of the Psalmist, " Do 
not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? — I 
hate them with perfect hatred." Yet it would 
have been better for Uzziah if he had hated 



108 " DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 



those who hated the Lord, and it would be bet- 
ter for us if there was that in our hearts which 
rose in righteous wrath against all workers of 
iniquity, against every insidious allurement of 
the world, the flesh, and the devil. It is not 
easy for us as Christians to break away en- 
tirely from the love of the world and the things 
in the world. Worldly people will call us 
narrow-minded and bigoted; they will say we 
at best are shutting our eyes to half the show. 
We may be half persuaded and half shamed 
into a toleration of practices which we know 
are either sinful in themselves or open the way 
to lives of worldliness and sin. We may not in- 
dulge for our own part in these things, but may 
just tolerate them and by silence give assent to 
their propagation. Better far for us to strike 
no truce with the enemy for he may wrap him- 
self in a white flag to persuade us of the purity 
of his motives ; but underneath this white ex- 
terior he bears weapons of death and is but 
waiting an opportunity to use them. 

A Philadelphia clergyman who recently left a 
banquet at which he had been invited to deliver 
an address, is to be highly commended. The 
good Doctor showed good sense, good patriot- 
ism, and a high degree of courage when he left 
that dinner because intoxicating liquors were 



" DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE " 109 

being served. Weaker men, men with less dis- 
cernment of the dangerous possibilities, men 
with less devotion to the laws of their native 
land, might have sat through the dinner, have 
delivered their address, have even possibly and 
good-naturedly taken the diners to task for 
their flagrant contempt of the fundamental law 
of the land, and have salved their consciences 
by saying that they had not themselves partaken 
of the cup that does inebriate. Not so this stal- 
wart man of God. There is no " save that " 
possible in the attitude of the man who would 
keep his life unsullied by the world. If we are 
making mental reservations; if we are trim- 
ming and hedging here and there! if we are 
shrugging our shoulders over things we know 
to be wrong, and which we might at least indig- 
nantly denounce; if we are tolerating in our 
own lives or the lives of our children those 
habits of thought as well as those practices and 
pleasures which correspond to the " high 
places " which Uzziah did not remove, we need 
to take fair warning that the wedge of sin is 
being driven in, that the leprosy of sin is taking 
hold of us, and separating us, further and 
further from that ideal self God purposed for 
us to be. 

As we glance backward today over the course 



110 "DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 



of life we have run, what is our own calm and 
deliberate judgment concerning ourselves? 
Must we any one of us sing the unhappy lines 
of the old hymn — 

" Where is the blessedness I knew, 
When first I saw the Lord? 99 

Do we look with regret upon wide chasms 
which separate the man or the woman we are 
today from the high-minded boy or the pure- 
souled girl we were in former years. Readers, 
of a former generation found great pleasure in 
Thomas Moore's poem, " The Peri." It will be 
recalled that this fair spirit belonging to a race 
which had been banished from Paradise, was 
told that she could re-enter the Realms of the 
Blest, if at the gates of Heaven she presented 
the most precious thing in the world. Inspired 
with a desire once more to* enjoy the glorious 
life of Eden, the Peri presented first one pre- 
cious thing and then another, but the gates did 
not open for her. One evening she saw a hard- 
ened, wicked, murderous robber as he stopped 
his horse near the cool waters of a fountain and 
paused in a kind of horrified admiration to look 
upon this man of plunder, blood, and death. 
The robber, as I remember the story, was just 
stooping to drink from the spring when, clear 



" DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE " 



111 



on the air of evening, from some distant min- 
aret, came the call to prayer. What did he see 
as he gazed into the polished surface of the 
mirroring fountain? Certainly he saw there 
the scowling forehead, the hard glittering dis- 
trusting eyes, the foul mouth from which so 
often had come words of blasphemy, of obscen- 
ity, and of hate. Perhaps also, mirrored by the 
side of this grim-visaged thing which he knew 
to picture himself, he saw the peaceful face, the 
tender eyes, the delicate mouth, the wistful ex- 
pression of the sweet and innocent child which 
once he was. How widely separate were the 
two. Further than the East is from the West 
had sin thrust him from the child he was, from 
the man he might have been. Overcome with 
remorse and repentance, the flinty heart was 
melted, and from his eyes fell tears of genuine 
sorrow and regret. The Peri caught the first 
of these tears and when she presented them at 
the Golden Gate, the portals swung wide for 
her to enter, for the most precious thing in the 
sight of heaven was the tear of a repentant 
sinner. 

This is not contrary to the word of Jesus 
who said, " Likewise joy shall be in heaven 
over one sinner that repenteth, more than over 
ninety and nine just persons, which need no re- 



112 "DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 



pentance." We are separated from our fellows 
because we are separated from our best self. 
We are separated from our best selves because 
of the disease of the soul we call " Sin." The 
cure for that disease is repentance, confession, 
and faith. If my words today reach one who 
knows himself to be thus alienated from the 
best there is in human society, to be estranged 
from his own better nature, will he not in godly 
sorrow for his sins and a yearning after new 
obedience, turn to Him who alone can heal the 
sickness of the soul ? " And when he came to 

himself ." 

The visible reason why Uzziah was com- 
pelled to dwell in a separate house and was ex- 
cluded from the house of the Lord, was that he 
was a leper: but the cause behind this visible 
reason lay deeper than the discoloured skin and 
the diseased tissues. The cause was in the heart 
and soul of Uzziah. After all, it was alienation 
from God. He dwelt in a separate house from 
his fellows and was a different being from what 
he should have been because he was estranged 
from God. Because only as men live in God 
are they their best selves. The possibility for 
largest growth, for completest development, for 
fullest and highest enjoyment, is in living with 
God. " If I live with God," says Emerson, 



" DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE h 113 



" my voice should be as sweet as the murmur 
of brooks and the rustle of corn. ,, If I live 
with God, my fellows should find in the words 
of my mouth, in the labours of my hands, in 
the symmetry and proportions of my personal- 
ity, that which appeals, fascinates, uplifts. The 
man who lives with God brings with him " airs 
from heaven." It is the man who is separated 
from God whose life withers and blights fair 
and beautiful things, who seems to bring 
" blasts from hell." 

My friend, if you are living conscientiously 
iu any known sin, you are alienating yourself 
from God. If you are living in complacent ac- 
ceptance of sin in the home, in the Church, in 
the community, in the nation, in the world, the 
seeds of the disease of death are already within 
you. You may not break out with some moral 
leprosy in a sudden and dramatic moment, as 
did Uzziah ; but you are driving yourself inevit- 
ably away from God, away from Him in whom 
alone life can find its fullest expression, its 
greatest usefulness, its highest glory. 

" We are sinners all." The apostle reminds 
us that all we have sinned and fallen short of 
the glory of God ; but we are also reminded that 
when we sin we have an advocate with the 
father, even Jesus Christ the righteous. Do we 



Ill " DE-SOCIALIZING DISEASE 99 

dwell in a several house, shut off from spiritual 
communion with God? There is forgiveness 
with Him, and if in repentance we cry as did 
the lepers who came to Jesus in old Judean 
days : " If thou wilt thou canst make me clean," 
His answer always is, " I will. Be thou clean." 



, THOU great Physician! O, Thou who 



art the balm of Gilead ! Cleanse Thou us 
from all unrighteousness; heal in us the leprosy 
of sin; remove from us every vestige of that 
terrible disease; bring us back to spiritual fel- 
lowship with Thy people, to a full expression 
of manhood and womanhood as it is in Christ 
Jesus; to joyous union with Thee in whose 
presence is fullness of joy for evermore. 
Amen. 




IX 



" FEASTING AND PRAYING ON 
MOUNT CARMEL " 

"So Ahab went up to eat and to drink: and 
Elijah went up to the top of Carmel; and he cast 
himself down upon the earth, and put his face be* 
tiveen his knees." — I Kings xvin.42. 

ELIJAH, prophet of God, and Ahab, 
wicked and selfish king, are by nature 
antipathetic. Their faces look in differ- 
ent directions. Their words and acts are in- 
spired by different motives. Whatever they 
may have in common, in outward form and 
semblance, discloses itself as anything but iden- 
tical when one looks into their hearts. 

This contrast begins in the position of the 
men. The one a proud, domineering, irrelig- 
ious tyrant ; the other a lowly, meek, but none- 
theless firm and pure-minded prophet. The one 
clothed in purple and fine linen and dwelling in 
his palace, surrounded by obsequious courtiers 
and trembling slaves. The other, gaunt, aus- 
tere, in the garb of a child of the wilderness, 
without permanent shelter for his head, and 
surrounded by a small circle of very devoted 

115 



116 FEASTING AND PRAYING 



and very faithful friends. This contrast runs 
far deeper than any external appearance or out- 
ward condition. It is in the soul of the men, 
for Elijah almost literally brings with him 
" airs from heaven " and Ahab surely suggests 
the mephitic " blasts of hell." 

This contrast in their character is illustrated 
by the motives which have brought them to 
Mount Carmel. Ahab, who* has met Elijah with 
the impolite, insulting query, " Art thou he that 
troubleth Israel?" has gone to Carmel to wit- 
ness the discomfiture and disgrace of the one 
whom he hates. Elijah, who met the king's un- 
friendly inquiry with the firm answer, " I have 
not troubled Israel ; but thou, and thy father's 
house, in that ye have forsaken the command- 
ments of the Lord," has gone to Carmel to be 
the human agent through whom God shall dis- 
comfit the prophets of Baal. Ahab, in other 
words, is there for purposes that are selfish, re- 
vengeful, and in every way opposed to true re- 
ligion. Elijah is there defending the religion of 
the one true God as his first mission and duty, 
and defending himself as a prophet of that God 
only in an incidental way ; for he too could have 
cried with one of much later times, " I could wish 
that myself were accursed from Christ for my 
brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." 



FEASTING AND PRAYING 117 



When the great test has been made and the 
prophets of Baal have been shown up for the 
frauds and hypocrites' which they were ; when 
Elijah has shown in a way that even the dull- 
spirited and stiff-necked Ahab could not doubt 
that Jehovah, the God of Israel, was the only 
living and true God, we find a further disclos- 
ure of the diametric difference in character be- 
tween the prophet and the king. Had Ahab 
witnessed a triumph of Baal worship, we may 
be sure he would have insulted Elijah, or even 
have thrust him into prison and ordered his 
execution. But when Elijah witnesses the 
overthrow of the prophets of Baal, his treat- 
ment of the king is of a very different nature. 
In fact, he lives up to the spirit of the New 
Testament injunction, "If thine enemy hunger, 
feed him, if he thirst, give him drink." For we 
read that Elijah said unto Ahab, " Get thee up, 
eat and drink, for there is sound of abundance 
of rain." Whereupon, as the words of our text 
inform us, Ahab went up to eat and to drink 
and Elijah went up to the top of Carmel and 
bowed himself in prayer and supplication. The 
man of God illustrates the injunction which 
was to> be given in later times and by the great- 
est of Authorities, " Watch and pray." 

In this text there is shown, as in a perfect 



118 FEASTING AND PRAYING 

mirror, the character of the two men. The 
whole land of Israel is suffering from long- 
continued drought. Flocks and herds have died 
in the parched and dusty fields, The brooks 
long-since have become dry, The rivers them- 
selves are arid, rock-strewn gulches, without 
water and without life. In consequence the 
entire land is suffering from famine, and Elijah 
is praying that the drought be broken, that the 
rains shall come, that the famine shall end. 
And while he labours in spirit Ahab must be 
feasted at improvised tables out on the hillsides. 
In fact, this text presents us with some such 
theme as this, " Praying and feasting on Mount 
Carmel." 

Ahab and Elijah have at least this much in 
common : each one wishes well for the land of 
Israel for each desires to see the rains return, 
the water-courses filled, the hillsides and valleys 
green and browsed by happy, healthy flocks and 
herds. Each one desires that there shall be 
abundance throughout the land. The great dif- 
ference is in the reason why they so desire. 
Ahab, on the one hand, wishes the country to be 
successful, prosperous, because from the land 
which has nothing, nothing can be got. The 
king's revenue is involved : heavily taxed peo- 
ples cannot pay their taxes when their seed-corn 



FEASTING AND PRAYING 119 



falls into powdered dust and the hungry fowls 
dig it up and devour it; when their cattle and 
sheep die for lack of food. There must be some- 
thing in the land before it can come to the king, 
and Ahab's desire for Israel was that they 
might plant and grow and reap and gather into 
barns, so that they might have wherewithal to 
keep him in luxurious estate. In a word, his mo- 
tive, his selfish attitude, his thoroughly worldly 
point of view is pictured by the fact that he sits 
down to eat and drink. Elijah, on the other 
hand, is interested in Israel, not for something 
which he can get out of it, but because Israel is 
God's people, because souls are perishing as well 
as bodies, because physical drought and famine 
are outward and visible signs of inward and 
spiritual starvation. No revenue will come to 
Elijah because of renewed prosperity. His mo- 
tives are altruistic and spiritual. His " heart's 
desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they 
might be saved." 

This ancient and wicked king brought thus 
into contrast with the noble spirit of the prophet 
presents for us not only a picture in historic 
contrasts but also in the contrasts between the 
selfish and the unselfish, between the carnally- 
minded and the spiritually-minded, between the 
wicked and the godly in this our own modern 



120 FEASTING AND PRAYING 



world. Thus a few years ago, there was, and 
for that matter there still is, great concern in 
this country as to whether the very foundations 
of society as now constituted, are not about to 
be destroyed. There is genuine and not alto- 
gether unfounded fear that Bolshevism may 
sweep western Europe, cross the Atlantic, and 
overwhelm America. Men of every shade of 
political creed have a hearing and get more or 
less of a following. Thoughtful men, there- 
fore, who believe in the value of permanent in- 
stitutions and of American democracy are genu- 
inely alarmed. From the mart of trade, from 
the office of the banker, from the manufacturer, 
from big business in general, there comes a 
chorus which says in effect, "If our institu- 
tions are to survive — if America is to» continue 
to be the land of opportunity — if our stocks and 
bonds are to have any value,— if there is any 
security for us and our children, any promise 
that we or they may enjoy the fruits of our lab- 
ours and the results of our thrift, we must sup- 
port the Church." Now, do* not misunderstand 
me. I rejoice as much as another one in this at- 
titude of mind and am as thankful as anyone 
can be that Mr. Roger W. Babson has arisen 
from the very midst of the money-changers of 
the world and has lifted up the voice of the 



FEASTING AND PRAYING 121 



prophet. I thank God for Mr. Babson ! But let 
me emphasize this truth, that too often it seems 
that if not Mr. Babson certainly others who 
echo* his words and warnings are moved by the 
motives of Ahab, rather than by those of Eli- 
jah. That is to say, their prayer to God for 
America is that America shall be kept safe for 
stocks and bonds. Their interest does not seem 
to be in the spiritual institutions of America, 
save as these spiritual institutions form the bul- 
wark for their banks and big business. 

It took a great crisis to show us that material 
successes could be swept away by the mighty 
tides of revolution, and too many of us, alas, 
see only the danger that threatens our material 
possessions. There are, however, among us 
those who see further and deeper, and who join 
their hearts and their voices with those of Eli- 
jah, and who cry out that our only salvation lies 
in communion with God, in obedience to His 
eternal law. Praise be to God that the Elijah 
spirits are amongst us, and that in the hours of 
our great peril, when the prophets of Baal as 
personified in the militarists of Europe, had 
been discomfited and the Ahab spirits were sit- 
ting down to eat and drink, — thank God for the 
Elijahs who climbed to the summit of Carmel 
and bowed their faces between their knees and 



122 FEASTING AND PRAYING 



prayed for the salvation of America, of the 
world. 

The contrasting spirits of the two men is seen 
today in a thousand other ways. It is especially 
notable in that some have, this very morning, 
climbed to the Carmels of their communities, 
and in God's houses of prayer, have confessed 
their own sins and prayed for the peace and 
progress of mankind and the advancement of 
the kingdom of Christ. But, alas, while you, 
my brethren and friends, and men and women 
with faith like unto yours, are at your morning 
devotion on the Sabbath day, how many thous- 
ands, even millions, of our fellow creatures, like 
Ahab, sit down to eat and to drink and rise up 
to play! They disport themselves on the sea- 
shore, they roam the hills, they dash at the risk 
of their own lives and the life and property of 
others in speeding motor cars along every road- 
way, they lounge in clubs, they lazily and aim- 
lessly lie abed at home, they read the latest 
scandals in the Sunday newspapers, they even 
sit in stupid idleness all unheedful of the long 
spiritual drought and of the consequent need 
and famine of the world. The spirit of Ahab 
is theirs and they are interested only in what 
will minister to the senses or give them ease 
and physical pleasure. In that terrible phrase 



FEASTING AND PRAYING 123 



of the Apostle Paul, " Their god is their 
belly." 

I should not be true to my mission as an ex- 
positor of this great passage were I to stop here, 
for this principle runs further beneath the sur- 
face than has been shown thus far. Indeed, 
within the sacred precincts of the Church itself, 
the Ahab spirit and the Elijah spirit may be 
found. The former incarnating itself in the 
more or less Pharasaic members of the religious 
community, those whose first interest in relig- 
ion is a selfish interest, those whose presence 
amongst the people of God has in all ages been 
a cause of offense and a block of stumbling, 
those whose presence in his own parish made 
Charles Kingsley to cry out against the damn- 
able heresy of being interested only in the sav- 
ing of one's own miserable little soul! For if 
we are of that spirit, we can read our wretched 
story in the pages of the gospel, where it is re- 
corded that when the loaves and fishes ceased to 
be supplied, and Jesus began to speak of spirit- 
ual food of the bread of heaven, the multitudes 
turned away and said, " It is a hard saying ; 
who can hear it? " We should be interested in 
our own souls, in our own spiritual nourish- 
ment and growth, in grace ; but if we are inter- 
ested only in our own welfare, we have not 



124 FEASTING AND PRAYING 



caught the spirit of Christ which was that of 
sacrifice for His brethren by the flesh — nor 
even the spirit of Elijah who* climbed to the top 
of Carmel and unselfishly flung himself into 
wrestlings of prayer, that the sweet rains of 
heaven might come. 

The thought cuts even deeper than this ; for 
among those who are spiritually-minded, who 
in some measure do have the passion of Elijah 
for the souls of men as well as for their bodies, 
there are some who* are at least partly of the 
Ahab spirit. For their attitude is that they will 
not give their support to the work of any pastor 
who does not feed them with that particular 
form of spiritual pabulum which they most af- 
fect. I will be very plain. Some desire that 
their pastor shall proclaim this, that, or the 
other emphasis in religion, almost to the exclu- 
sion of the great body of religious thought. I 
care not what it is, my brother, or how essential 
and necessary to religious faith any one doc- 
trine may be, when we arrive at that frame of 
mind and spirit where we are dissatisfied and 
ungracious unless our own taste in that matter 
is indulged by our church or our minister, we 
are dangerously near the spirit of Ahab who sat 
down to eat and to drink while Israel starved 
below him. 



FEASTING AND PRAYING 125 



It is, after all, the difference between the 
spirit of Peter and of Simon Magus, the differ- 
ence between Paul and Agrippa, the difference 
between Christ and Pilate — this difference be- 
tween Ahab and Elijah. And as Elijah prayed 
and watched, la! a cloud the size of a man's 
hand began to appear. This was the herald of 
the coming rains ; and we are led to believe that 
unless Elijah had been in Israel, yea, unless he 
had been on the top of Carmel, the blessed rains 
of heaven had not come to water the thirsty, 
dying land. Neither will the spiritual showers 
of the sweet heavens come to water the thirsty 
dying souls of men, unless we who are the spir- 
itual successors of Elijah, forget our pleasures, 
our own very lives, and climb the steep summits 
of our Carmel to plead with God that Israel 
may be saved. 

f~\ GOD, we acknowledge our selfishness and 
are heartily ashamed thereof. We pray 
Thee to give us the spirit of Elijah and remove 
from us the spirit of Ahab. Fill us with the 
spirit of Christ who came not to be ministered 
unto but to minister, and to give His life a ran- 
som. In His Name we ask it. Amen. 



X 



THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 

" Up, make us gods which shall go before us. . . • 
And all the people brake off the golden earrings, 
and brought them unto Aaron. . . . And he received 
them at their hands, and fashioned it with a graving 
tool, after he had made it a molten calf." — Exodus 
xxxii.i, 3, 4. 

NO one should deceive himself. Those 
who forsake the worship of God, who 
is a spirit and who must be worshipped 
in spirit and in truth, will pay in many kinds 
of coin. 

Moses, that great and unselfish man who- had 
delivered them from Pharaoh and brought 
them thus far on their journey toward the land 
they were to inherit, had disappeared from their 
midst. The people had seen him climb Mt. 
Sinai. Some of them had watched until the 
cloud had swallowed him up. While he com- 
muned with the Almighty and was receiving 
the commandments and statutes for their well- 
being, they grew restless of his extended al> 
sence. With nothing specially to occupy their 
hands and heads, they " sat down to eat and to 
drink and rose up to play." 

126 



THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 127 



Aaron had been left in charge of the camps 
of Israel, but he seems to have been a rather 
pliant man, unwilling to withstand the pressure 
of public opinion ; so when the people demanded 
of him, " Up, make us gods which shall go be- 
fore us," he did not rebuke them sharply as he 
should have done; he did not apparently even 
try to reason with them and show them the 
error of their way. One imagines that he 
shrugged his shoulders and said within himself, 
" It is no use either to argue or to command. 
They are a stiff-necked people, wise in their 
own conceits, and cannot be turned from, their 
folly by any word of mine. I will let them have 
their way but they must pay for it." He, there- 
fore, commanded them to surrender their gol- 
den earrings. Melting these he molded the gold 
into the form of a calf, or " ox/' as the marginal 
reading has it, and then finished it off with grav- 
ing tools. The fickle populace forgot the mir- 
acles of deliverance which had been wrought in 
their behalf, forgot their able and devoted leader, 
and cried in the presence of the molten calf, 
" These be thy gods, O Israel." Aaron pro- 
claimed a feast unto the Lord, but it is doubtful 
if the people had any devotion for the true and 
living God. Their worship was idol worship 
and they cried out with a shameless abandon- 



128 THE COST OP CALF-WORSHIP 



ment of their obligations to the God of their 
fathers, " These be thy gods, O Israel, which 
have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." 

We are permitted to see what took place on 
the mount. God revealed to Moses this defec- 
tion of the people, and threatened His venge- 
ance upon them, Moses prevailed in his inter- 
cession in their behalf, but his own anger broke 
forth when he came down from the mount and 
saw the disgusting orgies of this wicked and 
gainsaying people. We are given a glimpse of 
him as in a mingling of anger, sorrow, and bit- 
terness, he cast the tables out of his hands and 
broke them. His measure for punishment was 
swift and terrible. He caused the manufact- 
ured gods to be burned in the fire, ground to a 
powder, and spread upon the water which the 
children of Israel were compelled to drink. He 
rebuked Aaron for his complacency and then 
shouted a challenge to those who were on the 
Lord's side. To their eternal credit be it said 
that the sons of Levi gathered themselves to 
him. Moses commanded them to go through- 
out the camp and slay their sinful brethren. In 
this massacre three thousand men were put to 
death. He then decreed a day of solemn wor- 
ship to Jehovah and preached them a sermon 
on sin, calling upon them to repent. He then 



THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 129 



returned to the Lord and prayed earnestly in 
their behalf that the Lord would blot him 
rather than His people from His book of re- 
membrance. He won his petition and was com- 
missioned by the Almighty to continue to lead 
the people toward Canaan. 

In this sordid story one may easily observe 
how those who sin by forsaking God, pay for 
their apostasy in gold. Whenever we forsake 
our God and turn to worship any other person, 
place, or thing, we may expect to pay for our 
defection in gold or its equivalent. 

A few years ago one of our metropolitan 
dailies published an editorial on the " Waste of 
American money in Foreign Missions/' It 
seems that within one year the American 
churches had sent some twenty millions of dol- 
lars through their mission boards to different 
parts of the world. The writer of the editorial 
who probably had contributed little or none of 
the twenty millions of dollars, cried, like Judas 
did when the alabaster box was broken for our 
Lord, " Why this waste? " This writer felt, it 
seems, that we had pagans at our own door and 
underfed children and all the other objects for 
which money can be used, right in America. 
He said that if the Christian people would 
spend a little more at home and a little less 



130 THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 



abroad, they would show more sense. He also 
plainly hinted that religion costs too much. He 
might have answered his own argument out of 
the news columns of his paper for that very 
same date. There was a news item which said 
that a battleship, to cost at least twice as much 
as all the churches had given to Foreign Mis- 
sions, had been authorized by Congress. Now, 
a battleship is not a golden calf, but it certainly 
is one of the prices a nation pays to protect it- 
self from the greed and murder which wicked 
men let loose in the world. In other words, no 
one will claim that a world in which all men 
fear God and keep His commandments would 
need a battleship. 

Another way of illustrating the cost of apos- 
tasy is in enumerating what sin, vice, crime and 
their consequences cost the American people in 
taxation, for police courts, law machinery, pris- 
ons, and reformatories. But why deal in smal- 
ler facts when a monstrous fact is ever in our 
minds? It has been the style to say that in 
1914 Germany ran amuck and, as a lunatic na- 
tion, let loose on mankind the horrible destruc- 
tion of the war. Germany may have been the 
chief sinner, but I think no one will deny now 
that there was selfishness, greed, malice, envy, 
and all those other devils which enter the hu- 



THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 131 



man heart when Christ does not reign there, in 
the hearts of every nation in Europe, and, in 
greater or less degree, even here in America. 
Had Germany been true to the religion of 
Christ and the teachings of her greatest son, 
Martin Luther; had Austria-Hungary to the 
last man been Christian like John Hus and 
Jerome of Prague; had France possessed the 
spirit of Calvin or Massillon; had Britain been 
as sincere in her piety as was Wiclif and Rid- 
ley and Latimer: in a word, had the heart of 
Europe been pure with the love of Christ, the 
great World W ar would not have been fought. 
But they forsook God and all the world is pay- 
ing for sin, in taxes, in the increased cost of liv- 
ing ; in a word, in hard cash or gold. 

It is not difficult to see as we follow this story 
how the people of Israel paid in another coin : 
they paid in the coin of common-sense. Is it 
not ridiculous, this picture of grown men and 
women dancing around the molten and graven 
image of a calf and shouting in frenzied ecsta- 
cies, " This is our god " ? How had they been 
able thus to hypnotize themselves, to delude 
themselves into believing that this thing which 
yesterday did not exist, bait which was made by 
melting up their golden ornaments — how could 
they make themselves believe that this thing 



132 THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 



was a god ? The answer is in a New Testament 
phrase, that the god of this world had blinded 
them. They were in point of fact for the time 
being beside themselves. They had in a vulgar 
but useful phrase, " gone crazy on religion." 
Like all who go crazy on religion, however, they 
were crazy on the wrong kind of religion. They 
had really gone crazy from religion. They 
were sane when they worshipped God and fol- 
lowed Moses. On this subject at least they had 
become insane, when they danced and bowed 
and cried that a calf was a god. It is ever thus 
from the mildest form of this insanity to the 
wildest and deepest horrors of the same. 

Men lose their common-sense, their good 
judgment, or whatever you desire to call it, 
when they begin any kind of calf-worship. The 
Christian Scientist who sets up a premise and, 
to all intents and purposes, calls that his god, 
has lost common-sense. Of course, not all 
Christian Scientists go that far, but without 
any apology of any kind, I beg to state that 
they are considered by most of their fellow- 
citizens as unsound in their thinking processes, 
just in proportion to their devotion to that cult ; 
and its logical consequences may be seen from 
the fact that more than one mother, whose chil- 
dren were ill, has neglected to get medical as- 



THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 133 



sistance and so has permitted the child to suffer, 
and in some instances to die. I submit that 
what is wrong here is that they are paying for 
their apostasy in the coin of good judgment, or 
just plain common-sense. So does the man pay 
in this coin also who undertakes to live a double 
life; for, if his judgment were keen and clear, 
he would know that the misery and disgrace 
which entail upon such a life as he is leading, 
are a thousand- fold more than any pleasure or 
satisfaction he may think he gets from his du- 
plicity. The thief would know that he runs an 
awful risk of paying in hard labour and in im- 
prisonment for every dollar's worth of goods 
he steals ; and so on throughout the whole cata- 
logue of sins and sinners. We revert again to 
our illustration of war, for if men's reason were 
not unbalanced, if their common-sense were not 
paid out as a price, surely they would never suf- 
focate each other with deadly gases or blow one 
another to atoms with high-powered guns. 

Another coin with which they paid was the 
coin of self-respect. The older version says that 
Aaron had made them naked unto their shame 
among their enemies. The American version 
says that he had let them loose for a derision 
among their enemies. It is all the same thing : 
their self-respect had disappeared and the pic- 



134 THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 



ture which the mind draws of their religious 
festivities is not a pleasant one. Nor is it pleas- 
ant to think that we are still paying with a loss 
of self-respect, for our departure from the laws 
and the love of God. What else is the meaning 
of the picture as we see it in our daily papers of 
some multi-millionaire who beams out from the 
page with a complacent smile, while underneath 
his picture are black letters placarding his 
shame in having been divorced and remarried 
for the third time, or at his having recently 
been found guilty of illegal transactions in the 
business world ? How else explain the fact that 
women often boast of their divorces, and that 
they display themselves in person and in pic- 
ture, in postures and dresses, of body and of 
spirit which would make the more right-minded 
members of the sex hide their faces in shame? 
Loss of self-respect— that is the answer. God is 
dethroned and a calf of pleasure, of frivolous- 
ness, of self-gratification, has been set up; and 
for this calf they are paying in a coin of de- 
cency. This price is being paid by tens of thous- 
ands of our fellows. We see the fond but fool- 
ish mother who pushes forward, over dresses 
and bedecks with jewels, her young daughter, 
and practically puts her on the auction block. 
From such methods of paying in self-respect, 



THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 135 



all the way down to the " bum " who reeks with 
filth of the street and shamelessly protrudes a 
dirty hands to beg of you money with which to 
buy drink and drugs to make him lower still; 
in whatever way we find it manifesting itself, 
we can see the truth of this statement that those 
who turn away from God pay for it with a ter- 
rible price by the loss of self-respect. 

While reading this shameful page from the 
life of the chosen people our Christian senti- 
ment no doubt revolted at the command of 
Moses when he told the men of Levi to gird 
their swords and go out and slay every man his 
brother and every man his neighbour. Never- 
theless this gives us another form of the heavy 
toll which is laid upon us for our sin. We pay 
in blood, in human life, for dethroning God and 
setting up substitutes. We pay it in the crim- 
inal waste of child-life. We pay it in the eco- 
nomic waste of man-power, of those who at the 
heighth of what should be their usefulness are 
struck down by drink, by murderer, by murder- 
ous and inhuman labours, by war, and by every 
other thing, tool, weapon, or intrigue of the 
devil. Israel paid in that day with the blood of 
three thousand men. More than three million 
men, not all of whom by any means were the 
sinners, paid the awful price of sin in this latest 



136 THE COST OF CALF- WORSHIP 



and greatest war. Our theology may be so ad- 
vanced and humanized that we can no longer 
accept at face value the first half of the old 
statement " by man sin entered into the world " ; 
but I dare say that no one objects to the latter 
part, " and death through sin." For it was cer- 
tainly not righteousness, not joy and peace in 
the Holy Spirit, not the heart of the man of 
Galilee, which brought upon the world the 
night-mare period of death and destruction 
through which so recently we have passed. 

" The wages of sin," we have often been re- 
minded, " is death." We need also to recall 
again that the gift of God is eternal life. Israel 
had shamelessly abandoned the God who had so 
graciously and bountifully bestowed upon them 
signal tokens of His favour, They deserved to 
be paid with the coin of death : as a nation they 
merited extinction. But through the interces- 
sion of Moses this great calamity was averted. 
Any sinner who hears my voice or reads my 
words, who has been quickened so that he can 
perceive how dangerous is his calf-worship, can 
find forgiveness with that divine father of us all : 
for a greater than Moses " ever liveth to make 
intercession for us." If with all our hearts we 
truly repent and turn away from our wicked 
ways, we shall live. No matter how much of 



THE COST OF CALF-WORSHIP 137 



the coin of life we have spent in treasures of 
earth, in common-sense, in self-respect, in blood 
and tears, if we will, we may avoid paying the 
last and most precious coin of all — our souls. 

There is that young fellow who has acted the 
fool, has wasted his patrimony, has gone down 
to feed the swine, has so lost his self-respect 
that he would fain eat the husks upon which the 
swine are fed. Something happened to him and 
he said, " I will arise and go to my father." 
God grant that every sinner who has been pay- 
ing in one or more of these coins, may " come 
to himself " as he hears my words, as he reads 
this page; and may he too resolve, " I will arise 
and return unto, God for He will have mercy 
upon me and unto my God for He will abun- 
dantly pardon." 

(^\ , Thou who ever livest to make intercession 



for us, we acknowledge before Thee our 
un worthiness. If any of us have set up false 
standards in our lives, give us a knowledge of 
our danger, the will to forsake all and turn unto 
Thee. Remember not against us our follies of 
waste of our possessions and powers, nor the 
sins of our earlier days ; but in mercy deliver us 
from them and from their consequences both 
now and hereafter. Amen. 




XI 

THAT HE MAY RUN THAT 
READETH IT 

" And it was written in Hebrew and in Latin and 
in Greek." — John xix.20. 

PILATE was following a well established 
custom when he prepared a tablet or 
board with an inscription, to set up over 
the head of Jesus on the cross, for all criminals 
about to be executed were thus placarded. A 
" titulus," or charge on which the condemned 
was to be executed, was carried in front of him 
to the place of execution. That was part of his 
punishment. If his crime were particularly 
flagrant he would be jeered by the insulting 
populace, and stones and mud would be flung at 
him. When actually executed, this placard was 
fixed above his head so that all might read and 
know the crime for which he merited death. 

We are told that the title Pilate caused to be 
prepared for the head of Jesus was in three 
languages. Edersheim thinks the order of the 
languages was Latin, Greek, and Aramaic, (or 
a species of Hebrew). He thinks Matthew has 
given us the precise phrase of the Latin, " This 

138 



HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 139 



is Jesus, King of the Jews." That Mark ab- 
breviates ; but that he and Luke alike omit the 
name of Jesus and give the Greek form, " This 
man is the King of the Jews." He thinks John 
translates for us neither the form of the inscrip- 
tion in Latin nor the one in Greek, but gives 
rather the Aramaic. This last form emphasizes 
who Jesus was, and therefore since He is exe- 
cuted as a criminal it contains a greater insult 
to the Jewish people than either of the other 
forms. It says, " Jesus of Nazareth, the King 
of the Jews." It not only names Him, but picks 
out one of their sacred cities as His birthplace. 

Of these three languages Westcott has re- 
marked that they " Gather up the result of the 
religious, the social, the intellectual preparation 
for Christ, and, in each, witness was given to 
His office." Thus the Hebrew inscription over 
the cross represents the long record of spiritual 
or religious preparation from the call of Abra- 
ham down to the death of Christ. The Latin 
represented the social development of the world 
for the coming of Jesus, namely, the gathering 
of smaller nations together one by one, under 
great world powers which later were to be swal- 
lowed up' by the vast empire of Rome. The 
Greek represented the world's intellectual, or 
we may say its esthetic, preparation. For cul- 



140 HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 



ture of the human mind, its discipline, its care- 
ful and rigid training to think along philosoph- 
ical and scientific lines, as well as to blossom 
out in the plastic arts and in poetry and music, 
is represented by and flowers in the Greek peo- 
ple and language. 

It is recorded that originally " The whole 
earth was of one language and one speech." 
This may very well be a literal as well as an in- 
terpretative fact. The kinship of languages is a 
most interesting and instructive department of 
modern human knowledge. Whether originally 
there was but one speech, or whether this verse 
alludes to the known world, as then known, is 
all to one purpose, for there was and is a con- 
fusion of tongues. Men have grown very far 
apart in speech. But that is not all, for they 
differ just as greatly in customs, institutions, 
and laws. Contrast, for instance, the gloomy 
Danes, said to be the most melancholy and the 
most prone to commit suicide of any nation in 
Europe, with the vivacious Italian, where the 
suicide figures are almost a negligible quantity. 
Or, contrast France and Scotland. Without in- 
tending to reflect on either of these nations, it is 
not difficult to see that their ideals, their con- 
ceptions of life, are almost antipodal. Scotland 
is theological and France is artistic. 



HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 141 



It has become a habit to speak of America as 
the world's melting pot. I venture to say that a 
mere change of geographical position does not 
insure a change in character or disposition. My 
Hebrew friend will still speak with his mouth, 
shoulders, hands, and with unnamable shrugs 
of his head and contortions of his face, just as 
much in Jersey as he does in Jerusalem. You 
and I might live in Russia until the earth opened 
and swallowed us, yet we would not be Rus- 
sian. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
lived a large part of their later life in Italy, 
yet to their last day they remained sturdily 
British. And the mere bringing of the heart- 
sick, life- weary, soul-hungry peoples of an 
older and less fortunate part of the world to 
our shores by no means guarantees that they 
have assimilated the American ideas and cus- 
toms, or become converts to American religious 
principles. 

For after all America speaks with a Puritan 
accent, and many old-world born do not under- 
stand. But when we speak to them in the lan- 
guage of Christ-like self-forgetfulness, it is as 
though we used their own language. Perhaps 
that is one of the meanings where it is recorded 
that men " out of every nation under heaven " 
were able to hear every man in his own tongue, 



142 HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 



wherein he was born. If our message is to 
reach the heart and bring results, it must be un- 
derstood, and it is but understood when spoken 
in one's own mother tongue. 

Can anything be more suggestive of the di- 
vine application of saving truth to dull ears 
than this tri-lingual inscription over the head of 
The Man on the Cross? The placards were 
written in the three languages best known and 
most widely used. It is safe to say, these three 
languages covered the entire civilized world ; at 
least that no one who passed the place of cruci- 
fixion would be ignorant of all three. If he 
could read at all, there was at least one language 
he knew ; and if he could not read, he could un- 
derstand when read in his hearing. 

Thus the inscription, in his own speech, said 
to the devout Greek proselyte to Judasim, 
" This is Your King/' It said to the devout 
Roman, " This is Your King." And certainly 
it said to the devout Hebrew, " This is Your 
King." 

That which can take different peoples and 
center them on one common thought, bringing 
them into one common relationship, so that 
they are no longer strangers and enemies one to 
another, but fellow-citizens and even brothers, 
is a recognition of the common sovereignty of 



HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 143 



Jesus in the three writings on the Cross. This 
is the world's spiritual alkahest. 

How like our own country and our time was 
the year when Jesus was crucified ! Jerusalem 
was cosmopolitan; no less so proportionately 
than was the world's capitol, Rome. In the 
second chapter of Acts we read that there were 
dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men out of 
every nation under heaven. Some of these na- 
tions are specified, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, 
Mesopotamians, Phrygians, Cyrenians, Ro- 
mans, Arabians, etc. We are told, too, that 
these men spoke different languages. But of 
all this vast throng, perhaps there was none 
who could not in addition to his own tongue, 
speak one or more of the three languages used 
in Pilate's inscription. Latin was the official 
and legal language. Rome, though Grecian- 
ized, was still a Latin city. Greek culture was 
rapidly coming in, but the language in the 
courts of law and of the decrees of the emperor 
was the Latin. Tiberius was a monster, but he 
was not a foreign monster ; he was of the great 
Roman family of Julius. Not yet had the scep- 
tre departed from the house of Caesar. At the 
time of which we write the Roman poet Ovid 
had just shortly died. The Roman historian 
Livy and the Roman scientist, Pliny, were just 



144 HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 



coming into their majority. Seneca, one of the 
most illustrious men of his age, was still a very 
young man. These writers, all of whom used 
the Latin language, show us the tremendous 
importance still of Latin if Jesus was to appeal 
to that part of the world. 

In another way the Greek language was still 
more important. Ever since the days of Alex- 
ander, Greek had been the language of litera- 
ture and art and also of polite intercourse 
among nations. It was the native speech in im- 
portant provinces of the Roman empire. Even 
in the capital city, Greek was spoken so exten- 
sively that when St. Paul indited his letter to 
the Romans, he employed the speech, not of 
Caesar, but of Socrates. 

This third language, in another sense, was 
more important still. In the world's great 
ghettos today, in London, New York, Philadel- 
phia, and Chicago, there are fathers and moth- 
ers in Israel who do not speak the English lan- 
guage. They know Yiddish, and perhaps can 
read classical Hebrew, but the tongue of Wash- 
ington and Lincoln is unintelligible to them. 
Groups like these were in the Jerusalem of our 
Lord's day, and if these are to be informed who 
and what He is who hangs on the Cross, it 
could have been only by the Hebrew. 



HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 145 



These three represent men of widely different 
training, tastes, and temperaments. The tri- 
lingual inscription says to us that He who hangs 
here is of no one race of mankind, no section of 
earth. It proclaims the universal nature of the 
life, labours, and doctrines of Jesus of Naza- 
reth. It says in the concise and business-like 
speech of the pragmatic Roman : " Here is your 
King, and the King of all those who, in ages 
yet unborn, are your spiritual and tempera- 
mental children.'' In the Church of Christ the 
practical moralist has found his place. He 
has read in the language of his soul : " Here is 
a religion which works." It is not an imprac- 
ticable dream, a sublime but impossible ideal. 
It is the most practicable religion ever known to 
man. It has power, and that power can be con- 
nected with the machinery of life. In the indi- 
vidual it gives initiative and patience, so that 
noble deeds are both planned and executed. In 
the community it ministers to those who are 
" an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or 
naked, or sick, or in prison/' and lovingly and 
effectively ministers unto them. In the nation 
it promotes peace and plenty, and verifies the 
pious exclamation of the Psalmist, " Blessed is 
the nation whose God is the Lord." 

Are you a practical man, my brother ; a prac- 



146 HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 



tical woman, my sister? Read the inscription 
in your own language, and learn that here is 
One who offers you the noblest opportunities to 
make your life count for good, and who estab- 
lishes the work of your hands upon you. Yea; 
this very Cross itself is the most useful and 
helpful instrument ever known to men. 

Then there are those of esthetic soul. To 
these, "truth is beauty; beauty, truth," Har- 
mony of sound, gracefulness of form, soft 
blending of colour, — such things mean so much 
to them that the lack of harmony, grace and 
beauty hurts like a blow. To* such, even devo- 
tion must take the form of beauty. They are 
" Greeks " in that sense at least. And in whom 
can we find perfect beauty of life if not in Him 
over whose " sacred head now wounded " we 
read in the musical words of Hellas, " This is 
the King " ? Sidney Lanier presents this 
thought for us most melodiously in " The 
Crystal." 

" But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, 
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best 
Love, 

O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or 
Priest, — 

What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what 
lapse, 



HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 147 



What least defect or shadow of defect, 
What rumor, tattled by an enemy, 
Of inference loose, what lack of grace 
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or 
death's, — 

Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 
Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ ? " 

Do you love beauty? The beauty of good- 
ness, the beauty of a perfect life, is possible to 
you through Him who is the " altogether 
lovely " — who is the " rose of Sharon, and the 
lily of the valleys/' — in whose light the soul 
shineth as the bright and morning star. 

Just as there are those who love the goodness 
of beauty, so there are those who love the 
beauty of goodness. To whom else may those 
who are spiritually-minded look and receive sat- 
isfaction? Many devout souls, in all ages, have 
exclaimed with St. Augustine, " O God, Thou 
hast made us for Thyself ; and our heart is rest- 
less within us until it rests in Thee! " Those 
who hate evil in every form, who long for com- 
munion with God as the Psalmist longed when 
he cried out, " My soul thristeth for Thee . . . 
in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is " ; 
— those who yearn for moral purity and have 
often prayed, " Let the words of my mouth and 
the meditations of my heart be acceptable in 
Thy sight," — those whose hearts turn toward 



148 HE MAY RUN THAT READETH 



Him in whom " the worship of the whole world 
lies " — these find in Jesus the One who is their 
approach to the eternal God. 

Do you, my friend, long for moral purity, 
for spiritual cleansing? Do you pray for com- 
munion with Him? " As the hart panteth after 
the water brooks, so panteth my soul after 
Thee, O God." Read in the Hebrew of the 
heart the inscription of yon cross, and behold 
your king. Through Him, we come " unto 
Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living 
God," the gates of which are not shut by day, 
for there is no night there, " for the Lord God 
giveth them light, and they shall reign for ever 
and ever." 

"DLESSED Sufferer on the Cross; blessed 
risen Lamb of God : may we through Thee 
come into fullness of life and usefulness and 
joy unspeakable. May we be able to show our 
Lord to all who long for Him. And may there 
be usefulness, beauty, and purity in our lives, 
for evermore. Amen. 



XII 



REACHING ROME 



And so we came to Rome." — Acts xxvm.14 



HE great traveller has at last arrived 



His feet have measured out many a 



weary mile, " in journeyings oft." Like 
Tennyson's " Ulysses," many famous cities had 
he seen. The plains of windy Troy, made 
famous for all time by Homer's " Iliad " ; Anti- 
och, the glorious Queen of the East ; Ephesus, 
teeming with pleasure-loving thousands ; Phil- 
ippi, where Anthony and Octavius had battled 
for the mastery of the world; Corinth, com- 
mercial city extraordinary, where streams of 
ships from East and West exchanged their 
burdens ; Athens, famous in song and story and 
considered the intellectual capital of the world ; 
Jerusalem, rich in sacred history and the an- 
cient capital of His people, — all these the eyes 
of the apostle have seen. We catch some sug- 
gestion of what his ambitions were when we 
hear him say, " I must also see Rome." Rome, 
whose glory fills the world; Rome, whose 



(Amer. Rev. Ver.) 




149 



150 REACHING ROME 



power extends from the Euphrates to the pillars 
of Hercules and from the Libyan desert to 
those far-northern lands that lie stretched under 
blankets of everlasting snow: a Rome whose 
eagles are the sign of her ever-watchful and 
omnipresent soldiery; Rome, against whom 
Barbarians had led their hosts in vain; Rome, 
whose rising glory had dimmed the beauties of 
Carthage, of Egypt, of Greece. The man with 
the message feels a divine " urge " to see Rome. 

We can feel some of the exhiliration of spirit 
that must have been his when, in company with 
certain brethren, he walked from the Forum of 
Appius and the Three Taverns along that 
famous roadway which had clattered with the 
chariots of returning conquerors ; and especially 
when the walls and gates of the city opened to 
receive him. At last, he had reached Rome. 

The stages in his journey are doubtless in the 
writer's mind when he set down the words of 
our text. Luke's expression, " and so," may be 
thought of as referring to the last stage of the 
voyage and journey. Paul and his companions 
had spent the winter on the island of Melita. 
They had set sail in the spring on an Alexan- 
drian ship named " Castor and Pollux." They 
had touched at Syracuse, remaining there three 
days ; from thence had sailed to Rhegium ; and 



REACHING ROME 151 



then, driven by the south wind, had entered the 
harbor of Puteoli. The rest of the journey was 
on foot, — the last stage of it at least, over the 
stones of the Appian way. It would probably 
be better to think that the historian's " so " car- 
ries us further back and covers the entire jour- 
ney from Jerusalem to Rome. The stirring 
scenes of Paul's last days when plot and coun- 
terplot threatened and saved his life; his dra- 
matic removal to Cesarea ; the various trials to 
which he was subjected; his appearance before 
Felix, then before Festus, then before Agrippa ; 
his eloquent defense; the decision of Agrippa 
and Festus that he might have been set at lib- 
erty, had he not already appealed unto Caesar; 
— these events quite likely have their part in 
Luke's word, " so." Then the embarkation, the 
dangerous voyage, the tempestuous winds, the 
storm-smitten ship flying as if in fright, for 
fourteen days, before angry winds and upon 
snarling seas; the ship- wreck, the escape of 
Paul to the island, and the subsequent events 
there, — these, too, are a part of the way in 
winch he came to Rome. 

A deeper meaning still may be read here, for 
there is a sense in which every step in Paul's 
long life had been a step toward Rome. Born 
in far away Tarsus, in Cilicia, brought in early 



152 REACHING ROME 



life to Jerusalem, educated under the greatest 
scholars of his day, brought up in the strict dis- 
cipline and dogma of the Pharisee, — all of these 
things represent stages in his progress towards 
the city on the Tiber. His ardent persecution 
of the Christians; his dramatic conversion 
while on the road to Damascus ; his temporary 
blindness ; his silent years ; his early missionary 
days; his imprisonments; his scourgings; his 
perils by sea and by land; — all these were es- 
sential before Luke, who shared the later events 
only, could say " And so we came to Rome/' 

We may be sure that Paul would be inter- 
ested in the human life of that quiet city, in its 
historic scenes, in its history of world-making 
events and world-leading men. He was no re- 
cluse by nature. He who said of himself that 
he was all things to all men that he might save 
some, would not fail to enter into the life of the 
Roman people. But it is because he has a mis- 
sion to perform, because he has a message to 
deliver, because he has concern for the souls of 
the conquerors, because he is an ambassador in 
bonds ; it is mainly for these reasons that he re- 
joices to be in Rome. 

This is not his ultimate destination. Before 
him lie other roadways and already he at times 
catches visions of the new Jerusalem. None 



REACHING ROME 153 



the less, having reached Rome, he stands for a 
time as the type of the Christian who has 
reached his point of greatest earthly influence, 
of legitimate and worthy success. 

Certain kinds of worldly success are legiti- 
mate goals for the Christian. The exhortation, 
" Love not the world, neither things of the 
world," gives us the necessary warning. It is 
possible for us to substitute worldly aims, am- 
bitions, goals, for spiritual and eternal goals, 
ambitions, aims. It is entirely possible, how- 
ever, for us to set before ourselves ideals of ac- 
complishment and to use every legitimate 
means, every lawful endeavour, to reach the de- 
sired haven. The boy who throbs with an am- 
bition for an education ; the girl who sees in the 
future a beautiful and happy home of which 
she is the reigning queen; the man who plans, 
builds, sacrifices, and even suffers that he may 
establish a great, reputable, and useful busi- 
ness, — all of these are to be commended. 

Long since has the great body of Christian 
people repudiated the idea and practice of the 
Franciscan brethren. Our Lord distinctly 
prayed, not that God would remove His dis- 
ciples from the world, but rather that He would 
keep them from being overwhelmed by evil, 
while they pursued their course in and through 



154 REACHING ROME 



the world. It is only when the education, the 
home, the business, or any other earthly object 
or aspiration is looked upon as the ultimate 
destination, that there is danger. From the 
severely plain and disillusionizing statements of 
Jesus concerning the danger of riches, some 
have felt warranted in asserting that no one 
who sets out to reach the Rome of financial 
success can ever enter the Jerusalem of spirit- 
ual triumph; but such an interpretation is 
unwarranted. 

Abraham, man of faith, and friend of God, 
was a man of great wealth. Indeed, we are re- 
minded by one of his servants that " The Lord 
hath blessed my master greatly; and he is be- 
come great : and he hath given him flocks, and 
herds, and silver, and gold, and men-servants, 
and maid-servants, and camels, and asses/ ' 

Our Lord too- said, " Seek ye first the king- 
dom of God and his righteousness and all these 
things shall be added unto you." We admire 
Paul even the more because he did desire to see 
Rome and to bring his message to the very 
capital of the world; to be useful in the largest 
possible way. I for one have little patience 
with the pietistic humility sometimes taught to 
the effect that a Christian should have no am- 
bition save the salvation of his own immortal 



REACHING ROME 155 



soul. Such a religion is too one-sided, too 
self -centered. 

Our Creator has inspired our bosoms with a 
desire to excel, and today it is my high privi- 
lege and my manifest duty to urge everyone, 
especially the younger people, to set before 
themselves high standards of accomplishment. 
Those who already are established in business, 
or the professions, or any line of human en- 
deavour, should set standards of enlarged use- 
fulness, — should desire to see Rome. Those 
before whom life's untried roadways still lie 
open, should definitely decide upon some life 
work. There are calls to positions and places 
that are useful but not highly ornamental, and 
if one feels that his life work should be that of 
the carpenter, or the farmer, let him approach 
it in a reverent, a determined, a Paul-like way. 
Let him endeavour to be the best carpenter, the 
best farmer, it is possible to become. 

I urge you young men and young women to 
choose some life work; and if you are not 
manifestly unfitted for such high callings, I ask 
you to consider the opportunity before the 
Christian physician of tomorrow; the oppor- 
tunity before the Christian teacher; the op- 
portunity before the Christian statesman; the 
opportunity before the Christian minister and 



156 REACHING ROME 



missionary. To what Rome of high usefulness 
is God calling you? Hear His call and deter- 
mine with Saint Paul, " I must see Rome." 

When the determination first came to Paul to 
visit the city of the Caesars we do not know ; 
but from that day when he exclaimed, " I must 
see Rome," to this day when our text pictures 
him eagerly pressing down the Appian way and 
entering the gates of the mighty city, — between 
those dates are crowded all those things which 
make up the trials, hardships, setbacks, buffet- 
ings of life. We, too, who have our Romes 
before us, must not permit ourselves to be dis- 
couraged because we see no progress in the 
direction we desire to go, or because of storm 
and stress. 

The success of great men in business as we 
read afterwards what such men have accom- 
plished, may appear an unbroken series of 
triumphs from beginning to end. Yet, the 
great merchant princes of our land, as well as 
the men who have less dramatically succeeded, 
tell us of their discouragements, of the time 
when it seemed all but inevitable that they must 
be pushed to the " wall " ; of their long days of 
labour and nights devoid of ease; of bitter 
hours when in imagination they could hear the 
heart-breaking thump of the sheriff's hammer. 



REACHING ROME 157 



Yet, somehow, they tenaciously " held on " ; 
somehow the business did not go to the sheriff ; 
somehow credit was extended; old bills were 
paid which enabled them to pay their bills; 
somehow little by little they made progress, and 
one day had actually reached the forum of their 
Rome. 

The biographies of real Americans, when 
written in full, tell us stories without end of 
high-spirited young men who in the furrow of 
the field, or driving the horses which towed the 
canal boat, or splitting rails, or making shoes, 
or setting type in a printing office, or feeding a 
machine in a roaring factory, have yet deter- 
mined within themselves upon some Rome 
which they would reach, and have set out and 
reached it, after many hardships, many weary 
days, many sleepless nights. 

I have read that former Senator George F. 
Hoar, of Massachusetts, while a student at 
Harvard, lived upon a diet of beans which he 
himself cooked over a smoky oil stove in a little 
room of the proverbial " third floor back." 
From such a scene to that of the United States 
Senate where a gifted, high-minded, and cul- 
tured gentleman wears the toga of office, is a 
long, weary, tedious journey, but it is a journey 
which with the help of God and with terms 



158 REACHING ROME 



changed to suit the Rome towards which one 
aims, any American boy or girl may success- 
fully make. 

We sometimes feel like saying that hard- 
ships, difficulties, dangers, are not merely inci- 
dental to great success, bait that they are abso- 
lutely essential thereto. Certain it is that in the 
world of Paul's time, it was not possible to 
reach Rome without some physical hardship at 
the very best, and as we present his journey to- 
day, we are warranted in saying that the apostle 
reached Rome, in the highest and best sense, 
very largely because of all that he had suffered. 

Some years ago, I knew a young woman who 
possessed great gifts as a singer. She had been 
given the best training the teachers of this land 
could offer, and then had been sent abroad. 
Her life had been a very happy and successful 
one. She had never known the pinch of pov- 
erty, the scowl of enmity, or any of the ordi- 
nary unhappmesses of life. With her " life 
glared " ; and as there were no softer tints, no 
mellow lights in her life, neither was there in 
her singing. According to the critics, her pitch 
was perfect and her execution faultless ; yet she 
left her hearers cold; or, if they enthused, they 
enthused because of her winsome and charming 
personality. She was keen enough to see that 



REACHING ROME 159 



somehow she had not exactly " arrived." I 
overheard her pastor, an old man, say to her 
one day, " My dear young lady, there is but one 
thing lacking. By and by, somebody will break 
your heart and then your songs will touch 
broken-hearted humanity." It was even so. A 
great, overwhelming sorrow came into her life, 
and there was a new note in her song. We 
ought to be able to say, " For we glory in tribu- 
lation." We ought to be able to understand 
that these things work for us a far more ex- 
ceeding and abundant weight of glory. 

Let us here repeat what we have before said, 
that we have been discussing the nearer goals, 
the Romes of life rather than the Jerusalems, — 
the City Celestial. We may be sure, too, that 
whatever satisfaction there was to Paul in being 
able to see the world's capital, his chief joy was 
to carry his message beyond the very doors of 
Caesar's palace, to be instrumental in establish- 
ing the Church of Christ in the heart of the 
pagan world. He knew that Rome was not his 
final destination. Later on we hear him saying 
to Timothy, " Henceforth, there is laid up for 
me a crown of righteousness." While we may, 
indeed should, desire to reach goals of earthly 
usefulness and high success, we too must keep 
in mind that some day we will lay down our 



160 REACHING ROME 



tools, lay aside our laurels, go out of our office 
or store, or school room, or pulpit, never to 
return again. It will be because we have taken 
up another staff than the staff of earthly pil- 
grimage, and have laid aside the dust-covered 
sandals that are cut with the stones of our Ap- 
pian ways ; — that we have moved on into that 
'* city which hath foundations, whose builder 
and maker is God." 

TP\EAR Lord, Thou Who didst inspire the 
' great Apostles to take Thy message to the 
people at Rome, inspire us to do- some great 
service for Thee with our fellowmen. Thou, 
Who didst go with him in all the perils of his 
journey, go Thou, we pray Thee, with us. 
Thou, Who didst at last receive him unto Thy- 
self, crown us who by faith look unto Thee, one 
day in the City Celestial. Amen. 



Printed in United States of America. 



Deac.dif.ed using.the Bookkeeper procesJ 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2006 

PreservationTechnoiogie: 

; WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVAT.O 

111 Thomson Park. Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



